1 


^1 — * 


[P.  90 


LOOKING    FOR    LIKELY    CATS 


MR.  MILO  BUSH 

and  Other  Worthies 

THEIR  RECOLLECTIONS 

By 
HAYDEN  CARRUTH 

AUTHOR  OF 
"THE  ADVENTURES  OF  JONES  "  ETC. 

Illustrated  by 
A.    B.    FROST 


NEW    YORK    AND     LONDON 

HARPER  &   BROTHERS    PUBLISHERS 

1899 


BY   THE    SAME    AUTHOR. 


THE  VOYAGE  OF  THE  RATTLETRAP. 
(Young  People  Series.)  Illustrated  by  II.  M.  WIL 
DER.  Post  8vo,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  $1  25. 

The  Rattletrap  is  a  prairie  schooner  in  which  two 
young  men  and  a  boy  travel  through  Dakota  and  North 
ern  Nebraska.  Incidentally  information  is  given  of  life 
in  those  states  twenty  years  ago.  Many  humorous  in 
cidents  enliven  the  story. 

A  capital  narrative. — Literary  World,  Boston. 

THE  ADVENTURES  OF  JONES.  Illustrated. 
IGmo,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  $1  00. 

This  is  a  series  of  alleged  adventures  told  by  an  im 
aginary  Mr.  Jones  (a  nineteenth-century  Munchausen), 
in  which  the  author  has  drawn  upon  his  liglit  and  airy 
fancy  for  some  very  amusing  and  absurd  situations.  The 
stories  have  the  charm  of  "go"  to  them. 


NEW    YORK    AND    LONDON  : 
HARPER  &   BROTHERS,  PUBLISHERS. 


Copyright,  1899,  by  HAKPER  &  BROTHERS. 

All  rights  reserved. 


TO 

E.  B.  C.  B. 


M128564 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER  PAGB 

I.  GOLDSTEIN'S  EQUESTRIAN  JOKE  ....  i 

II.  MEN  OF  MARK 12 

III.  GREELEY'S  HANDWRITING 28 

IV.  TALES  OF  Two  HORSES 37 

V.  FOG 47 

VI.  THE  PASSING  OF  GEN'L  JACKSON    ...     55 

VII.  "THE  COLONEL" 64 

VIII.  PUBLIC  DEBATE 73 

IX.  BUDSTART'S  PECULIAR  ELECTION    ...     85 
X.  THE  LONG-SUFFERING  SCANDINAVIAN  .     .     96 
XL  THE  UNFORTUNATE  TOWN  OF  BLUEBLOS- 

SOM 103 

XII.  THE  JUDGE'S  BURGLAR 112 

XIII.  YULE-TIDE  MEMORIES 123 

XIV.  A  SUBURBAN  ADVENTURE 142 

XV.  JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER'S  GULCH  .     .    .151 

XVI.  RECOLLECTIONS  OF  THE  STAGE  ....  162 

XVII.  CORONER  RAFFLEBONE 173 

XVIII.  "SIMMONS" 181 

XIX.  MR.  BUSH'S  CIRCUS .193 

XX.  IN  THE  STUDIO 203 


ILLUSTEATIONS 


LOOKING  FOR  LIKELY  CATS Frontispiece 

THE  JUDGE   DISCOURSES  OF  FOG  ....    Facing  p.      48 
UNSPORTSMANLIKE       CONDUCT       OF       THE          " 

GREASED  TIG "  110 

A  VISIT   FROM   ONE    OF   NATURE'S   NOBLE 
MEN  "          158 


Mr.  Milo  Bush  and  Other  Worthies 


GOLDSTEIN  S    EQUESTRIAN    JOKE 

Isaac  Goldstein  is  a  citizen  of  this  repub 
lic,  long  engaged  in  merchandising.  He 
has  not  been  a  fixed  dealer,  glorying  in  gor 
geous  window  displays  and  bellowing  ad 
vertisements  in  the  Sunday  papers;  but, 
instead,  he  has  been  a  peripatetic  trader, 
going  to  the  customer  rather  than  waiting 
for  the  customer  to  come  to  him.  And  in 
this  there  are  not  wanting  those  ready  to 
maintain  that  he  has  shown  the  part  of 
wisdom,  since,  these  logicians  contend,  it  is 
as  absurd  for  a  merchant  to  wait  for  cus 
tomers  as  it  would  be  for  a  hunter  to  wait 
at  home  for  game  to  bound  across  his 
hearth-stone  or  alight  upon  his  sideboard. 
But  these  speculations  need  not  detain  us; 


MR.   MILb  B.tJSH'  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

rather  let  us  follow  Goldstein  afield  as  he 
pursues  the  sometimes  uneven  tenor  of  his 
way. 

As  has  been  in  a  manner  hinted  at,  Isaac 
Goldstein  is  a  pack-peddler.  For  twenty 
years  he  has  gone  up  and  down  the  more 
sequestered  rural  regions  of  the  land,  carry 
ing  an  immense  load  of  miscellaneous  mer 
chandise,  which  he  has  offered  at  a  profit 
so  small  that  he  has  twenty  times  a  day 
stood  aghast  at  his  own  hardihood.  It 
would  have  been  easier  to  work,  but  he  has 
preferred  to  peddle.  Dogs  have  bitten  him 
—  yea,  more,  dogs  have  gnawed  him,  dogs 
have  partaken  of  him,  dogs  have  whetted 
their  fangs  upon  him,  dogs  have  all  but 
buried  him  in  the  back  yard  in  the  guise  of 
a  bone;  but  not  once  has  the  base  thought 
of  deserting  proud  Trade  for  paltry  Labor 
crossed  the  Goldstein  mind.  And  not  dogs 
alone.  The  rains  have  descended  and  wet 
him,  the  snows  have  come  down  and  cov 
ered  him,  the  mud  has  oozed  about  his 
feet,  the  dust  has  swirled  around  his  head, 
small  boys  have  pelted  him  with  promis 
cuous  missiles,  and  occasionally  a  bucolic 
bull  has  tossed  him  on  his  horns  and  bel- 


GOLDSTEIN'S  EQUESTRIAN  JOKE 

lowed  as  vaingloriously  as  if  he  had  de 
spatched  a  matador. 

But  Goldstein  has  not  complained,  and  he 
has  stuck  to  trade.  Personally  he  is  a  man 
who  would  attract  attention  anywhere, 
solely  for  the  reason  that  he  would  not  de 
serve  it.  He  is  somewhat  below  the  average 
height,  with  stooped  shoulders,  rather  more 
than  his  share  of  nose,  and  with  a  black, 
bushy,  tangled  beard,  a  woven-wire  beard, 
or,  to  enlarge  the  figure,  a  jungle-like 
beard,  a  trackless,  unexplored,  unknown 
beard,  which  even  the  dogs,  despite  all  their 
efforts,  have  never  penetrated.  But  though 
this  description  does  not  set  Goldstein  forth 
in  glowing  colors,  it  must  not  be  thought 
that  there  is  anything  repulsive  about  him. 
Far  from  it;  he  has  an  insinuating  way  and 
much  personal  magnetism.  Nor  is  he  any 
fool;  on  the  contrary,  he  hath  a  pretty  wit, 
though  one  tinctured  a  little  by  his  trade 
instincts,  as  shall  appear. 

For  years  Goldstein  handled  miscella 
neous  goods,  done  up  in  a  great  square  can 
vas-covered  pack,  ranging  from  needles  in 
assorted  sizes  to  table-cloths,  and  from 
husking-gloves  to  sleigh-bells,  and  includ- 

3 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

ing  writing-ink,  chromoes,  dry  yeast,  plated 
jewelry,  cough  medicine,  accordions,  rub 
ber  dolls,  dress  patterns,  playing-cards, 
Methodist  hymnals,  Episcopal  prayer- 
books,  and  Catholic  rosaries  —  the  beads  of 
the  last-named  whittled  out  of  wood  of  the 
true  cross,  obtained  by  Goldstein  from  an 
uncle  in  the  Holy  Land  at  considerable 
expense. 

But  the  rage  for  specialization  reached 
Goldstein  at  last,  and  he  gradually  began 
to  reduce  his  stock,  and  finally  he  gave  his 
whole  attention  to  some  one  thing.  For  a 
while  he  handled  an  improved  carpet- 
stretcher,  of  the  kind  used  in  the  White 
House  and  by  the  Crowned  Heads  of 
Europe.  Then  he  took  up  an  improved 
wire  rat-trap,  a  very  Lorelei  of  a  rat-trap, 
a  siren  rat-trap,  a  rat-trap  warranted  to  lure 
rats  as  sin  lureth  mankind,  and  to  catch  and 
hold  and  destroy  the  same.  Other  house 
hold  specialties  followed,  till  at  last  he 
struck  upon  a  certain  style  of  clothes-horse, 
an  ingenious  contrivance  for  the  proper 
drying  and  airing  of  clothes  and  household 
linen  after  being  ironed.  It  was  called  the 
Chicago  Imperator  Adjustable  Clothes- 


GOLDSTEIN  S    EQUESTRIAN    JOKE 

Horse,  and  was  an  apparatus  which  stood 
on  the  floor  and  spread  out  like  a  banyan- 
tree  when  in  use,  but  closed  up  like  a  Lom- 
bardy  poplar  after  it  had  served  its  pur 
pose.  It  was  the  same  as  used  with 
great  success  by  the  President  and  mem 
bers  of  the  Cabinet,  as  supplied  to 
them  a  year  before  by  the  present 
dealer,  a  man  not  given  to  small  deceit  or 
any  sinful  games.  He  sold  the  clothes-horse 
for  one  dollar,  affording  a  profit  so  small 
and  abjectly  insignificant  that  should  his 
brother,  the  manufacturer,  come  to  know 
of  it,  he  (the  present  speaker)  should  fear  for 
his  life  at  the  avenging  hands  of  the  out 
raged  relative. 

It  happened,  a  few  months  ago,  that  Gold 
stein  one  day  found  himself  in  a  settlement 
of  Norwegians  in  a  central  Minnesota 
county.  Business  was  poor.  Spring  was 
creeping  up  that  way,  and  the  mud  was 
deep.  The  dogs  were  unusually  vicious, 
and  he  was  averaging  a  bite  a  mile.  Gold 
stein  was  as  near  being  discouraged  as  was 
possible  for  him.  His  troubles  even  roused 
his  fancy  (a  member  of  the  Goldstein 
make-up  of  no  great  size  or  activity),  and 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

for  a  moment  the  thought  crossed  his  mind 
of  how  pleasant  it  would  be  could  he  mount 
one  of  the  clothes-horses  which  he  carried 
on  his  back  and  gallop  away  from  the  for 
bidding  country.  This  idea  so  pleased  him 
that  he  chuckled  to  himself,  and  came  up 
quite  briskly  to  the  next  house,  where,  after 
the  dog  had  bitten  him  to  his  (the  animal's) 
satisfaction,  he  entered  and  began  a  vigor 
ous  and  voluble  enlargement  on  the  worth 
of  his  clothes-horses,  ending  with  his  invari 
able  joke  that  "  she  doan  keeck,  an'  you 
doan  neffer  haf  to  feed  her  no  oats." 

But  eloquence  and  humor  alike  failed  to 
move  the  economical-minded  Scandinavian, 
and  Goldstein  was  just  departing,  when  the 
man  happened  casually  to  mention  that  a 
great  wedding  was  to  take  place  in  the 
neighborhood  soon,  the  son  of  one  Ole 
Olson,  a  prominent  farmer,  marrying  the 
daughter  of  a  certain  Knut  Knutson,  an 
equally  important  resident  of'  that  pic 
turesque  and  interesting  neighborhood. 

Goldstein  paused  with  his  hand  on  the 
latch.  The  information  opened  up  a  vast 
vista  of  profit  to  his  mind's  eye. 

"Vedding,  eh?"  he  said.  "Veil,  I  tells 
6 


GOLDSTEIN'S  EQUESTRIAN  JOKE 

you  vhat  you  vants  to  do.  Shust  you  geet 
von  of  dem  bosses  for  a  bresent  for  de 
pride.  Eh?" 

"You  tank  he  do?"  inquired  the  son  of 
the  fjords,  doubtfully. 

"Do?  Do?  you  ask.  Vhy,  she  vas  made 
for  eet!  "  He  wrenched  one  of  the  clothes- 
horses  from  the  bundle  and  stood  it  before 
the  halting  Viking.  "  Vill  she  do!"  he 
cried,  patting  the  article  as  if  it  had  been  a 
living  horse.  "  Vhy,  great  shimminy,  dose 
Wanderbilts  couldn't  geet  noddings  more 
better  for  a  vedding  bresent  dan  she  is! 
Vhat  you  tink  you  geef  de  pride  —  a  di'- 
mont  neglace,  a  beelyard  table,  a  tame  bear? 
Doan  you  do  eet!  You  puy  her,  an'  gif 
her  to  de  pride,  an'  she  be  most  tickled  to 
det'." 

The  Norwegian  looked  at  his  wife  and 
then  back  at  Goldstein,  and  said, 

"  Veil,  aye  tank  aye  take  heem."  And  he 
handed  out  his  dollar  and  closed  the 
bargain. 

Goldstein  put  the  dollar  in  his  pocket  and 

went  out.     The  dog  bit  him  again,  but  he 

felt   it   not.      Great   thoughts   were   racing 

through  his  mind.     He  felt  as  if  he  was  rid- 

7 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

ing  his  clothes-horses  at  last  —  four  of  them 
abreast,  with  another  quartet  driven  ahead 
with  red  ribbons,  like  the  man  in  the  circus. 
He  plunged  away  through  the  mud,  while 
the  dog  went  back  to  the  house  with  a  lame 
jaw. 

The  day  which  was  to  make  the  fair  Lena 
Knutson  and  the  brave  Lars  Olson  one  had 
arrived.  Weddings  in  that  neighborhood 
began  early  and  lasted  late.  It  was  not  past 
ten  o'clock  in  the  forenoon  when  the  first 
team  drove  up  to  the  door  of  the  bride's 
parents.  Mr.  Peter  Bjorkson  and  family 
tumbled  out  and  came  into  the  house.  Mr. 
Peter  Bjorkson  carried  an  immense  package 
done  up  in  heavy  paper.  He  unrolled  it, 
and  to  the  bride,  in  melodious  Norse,  said 
words  which  we  may  freely  translate  after 
this  manner: 

"  We  bring  thee,  Lena,  with  our  best 
wishes,  a  poor  offering,  but  it  comes  from 
our  hearts  —  a  clothes-horse.  It  won't  kick, 
and  doesn't  need  any  oats." 

The  big  blue  eyes  of  the  bride  beamed 
with  pleasure  as  she  took  it  and  thanked 
the  givers.  It  was,  in  fact,  precisely  what 
8 


GOLDSTEIN  S    EQUESTRIAN    JOKE 

she  wanted.  But  time  presses,  and  we  must 
hurry  on. 

Which  is  why  the  exact  words  of  presen 
tation  of  Mr.  Tosten  Estenson  and  family, 
who  arrived  ten  minutes  later,  and  brought 
a  clothes-horse,  need  not  detain  us.  The 
next  to  come  was  Swan  Swanson  and  wife. 
They  brought  a  clothes-horse  for  the  bride. 
They  were  followed  by  another  neighbor, 
Erick  Bogstieson  and  family.  Nor  did  the 
Bogstiesons  forget  that  the  bride  was  soon 
to  begin  housekeeping;  so  they  brought  to 
her,  with  all  good  wishes,  a  clothes-horse, 
as,  indeed,  did  also  Neighbor  Ophdahl. 
Space  is  short;  the  historian  may  barely  say 
that  Axel  Ottoson,  Thor  Nordgaard,  Hans 
Sjorring,  and  Ole  Iverson  brought  to  the 
bride  clothes-horses.  At  one  o'clock,  p.  M., 
there  was  a  stud  of  nineteen  clothes-horses 
in  the  house,  and  more,  so  to  say,  neighing 
outside.  At  1.30  the  bride  looked  out  of  the 
window. 

"Father/'  she  said,  controlling  herself 
with  an  effort,  "  there  are  twenty-three  here 
now,  and  there  comes  Mr.  Mikkleson  up  the 
walk  with  another." 

The  voice  of  a  man  was  heard  at  the  back 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

door.  "  We  have  brought  Lena  a  clothes- 
horse,"  the  voice  said.  The  bride  burst  into 
tears  and  sank  to  the  floor.  But  this  matter 
must  detain  us  no  longer.  It  is  almost  too 
painful  to  dwell  upon. 

Up  rose  the  bridegroom,  like  Thor  of  old, 
and  swore  by  Odin  and  Valhalla  and  the 
Valkyries  and  their  horses,  and  called  for 
volunteers  to  go  with  him  and  help  him  to 
catch  that  peddler.  Twenty  strong  men  re 
sponded.  As  they  went  out  they  encoun 
tered  a  couple  of  neighbors  with  clothes- 
horses  for  the  bride.  They  leaped  into  their 
wagons  and  drove  away  toward  the  railroad 
station.  On  the  road  they  met  several  other 
neighbors  carrying  large  mysterious  pack 
ages,  the  contents  of  which  they  but  too 
well  guessed.  At  the  station  the  ticket- 
agent  told  them  that  a  man  answering  the 
peddler's  description  had  boarded  the  train 
the  night  before  with  a  ticket  for 
Des  Moines,  Iowa.  They  returned,  passing 
a  few  scattering  neighbors  bearing  a  service 
able  article  of  clothes-horse. 

At  that  moment  two  hundred  miles  away 
plodded  Isaac  Goldstein,  with  a  pack  of  Chi 
cago  Imperator  Adjustable  Clothes-Horses 
10 


GOLDSTEIN  S    EQUESTRIAN    JOKE 

on  his  back,  which  he  was  offering  to  the 
people  of  Iowa  at  the  ridiculous  price  of  one 
dollar,  with  the  warrantee  that  they  would 
not  kick  and  required  no  fodder.  Guard 
edly,  too,  he  occasionally  inquired  for 
weddings. 


II 

MEN  OF  MARK 

Commonly  when  anyone  else  told  a  story 
in  Shanks's  grocery  store  Mr.  Milo  Bush 
would  move  about  uneasily  on  his  custom 
ary  dried-apple  barrel  and  sniff  the  air  sup 
erciliously.  When  the  man  made  a  palpable 
misstatement  of  fact  he  would  break  in  and 
frankly  agree  with  it,  at  the  same  time  gently 
casting  doubts  on  the  obvious  truths  of  the 
other's  tale.  The  story  finished,  Mr.  Bush 
would  invariably  begin  one  of  his  own  be 
fore  anyone  else  could  speak.  Indeed,  he 
would  oftentimes  "  succeed  himself,"  like  a 
fortunate  office  holder,  and  follow  one  tale 
with  another,  to  the  manifest  disgust  of  such 
raconteurs  as  Mr.  Mark  Wallis  and  Mr. 
Abner  Blackmark.  It  was  on  an  occasion 
of  this  kind  that,  after  recalling  the  instruct 
ive  experience  of  a  young  novelist  from  the 
East  who  came  out  looking  for  local  color 
—  and  found  it  —  he  went  on  in  this 
manner: 

12 


MEN  OF  MARK 


"  Now  this  man  Mosher,  that  you  heard 
the  boys  speaking  of  as  now  being  in  Cali 
fornia,  and  in  the  Legislature  or  the  peni 
tentiary —  some  says  one,  and  some  says 
the  other  —  why,  you  ought  to  a-knowed 
him.  He  was  just  the  smartest  business 
man  that  ever  struck  this  town.  He  wasn't 
what  you'd  call  an  eddicated  man,  nor  he 
wasn't  a  rich  man,  nor  he  didn't  have  no 
particular  trade  or  profession,  nor  even  any 
special  business,  but  he  was  just  lightning 
on  general  business,  all  the  same.  He 
wasn't  anything  to  look  at,  either  —  went 
around  wearing  old  clothes,  and  had  a  kind 
of  a  cramped-up-appearing  face,  as  if  his 
features  was  crowded.  From  what  I  know 
of  him  now,  I  should  say  that  they  wa'n't 
probably  his  features  a-tall,  but  the  features 
he  had  euchred  some  bigger  man  out  of. 
If  you'd  seen  him  you'd  a-said  he  didn't 
know  enough  to  lay  straight  in  bed,  and 
likely  next  day  he'd  a-had  your  pocket-book 
and  a  deed  to  your  house  and  lot.  He  was 
'way  up  on  business  —  plain,  straight,  legiti 
mate  business. 

"Made  his  start  here  by  selling  a  snow 
tunnel  to  a  Boston  man.  That's  the  plain 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

trooth  —  run  a  fifteen-hundred-foot  tunnel 
under  thirty  feet  of  snow  in  Plug  Hat 
Gulch,  and  sold  it  for  $4000  as  a  developed 
mine.  When  the  snow  melted  in  the  spring 
that  Boston  man  said—  Well,  to  have 
heard  him  you'd  never  thought  he  was  from 
Boston;  you'd  a-said  he  was  from  some 
place  where  they  teached  hot,  bloo,  rip- 
snorting  language  in  the  public  schools,  and 
that  he  was  a  graduate  of  the  high-school. 
Talk!  Well,  Pete  Kimlin  was  the  profanest 
man  in  this  town,  but  after  he  heard  that 
Boston  man  he  just  quit.  He  said  he  seen 
the  whole  thing  laid  ahead  of  him  —  that  he 
only  knowed  a  very  little  about  the 
rujuments. 

"  But  the  way  Mosher  salted  the  stock  on 
the  Britisher  was  what  I  was  going  to  tell 
you  about.  You've  heard  of  this  here  water 
ing  the  stock  by  them  there  Wall  Street 
men?  Well,  Mosher  salted  the  stock,  just 
like  you'd  salt  a  gold-mine  you  was  going 
to  sell  to  a  tenderfoot.  The  Britisher  was 
named  Edgewater,  and  he  had  a  roll  of 
money  like  a  cotton  bale.  He  was  looking 
for  investments,  and  we  all  had  'em  for  him. 
We  woke  that  feller  up  in  the  night  to  show 

14 


MEN  OF  MARK 

him  investments.  We  showed  him  two  in 
vestments  at  a  time.  I'll  bet  he  thought 
he'd  struck  the  home  office  of  the  Great 
Original  World's  Supply  Investment  Fac 
tory,  and  that  it  was  running  on  double 
time.  We  give  ourselves  plumbago  bowing 
and  scraping  to  him,  and  calling  him  '  My 
Lord,'  and  '  Your  Highness,'  and  such  stuff, 
thinking  he'd  like  it.  But  he  was  shy. 
Nibbled  a  little  once  or  twice,  but  never 
took  hold  of  the  hook.  We  tried  every  kind 
of  bait,  but  he  wouldn't  rise.  All  this  time 
Mosher  was  gawking  round  town  talking 
loud  'bout  the  American  eagle,  and  saying  as 
how  the  bird  could  scratch  the  British  lion's 
eyes  out  with  one  foot  tied  behind  his  back, 
and  that  Englishmen  ought  to  be  rid  out 
of  the  country  on  rails,  and  all  such  crim 
inal  language  as  that.  There  was  talk  of 
lynching  Mosher,  and  it  went  mighty  close 
to  being  done. 

"  Then  one  day  what  did  Mosher  do  but 
walk  up  to  the  Englishman  in  front  of  the 
hotel  and  slaps  him  on  the  back  —  slams 
him  right  plumb  between  his  royal  shoulder- 
blades —  and  says  he:  'Mr.  Britisher' — 
just  like  that — 'Mr.  Britisher,  why  don't 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

you  buy  a  stock-ranch?'  The  man  said  he 
just  as  soon,  and  asked  him  what  he  had 
to  offer.  '  I've  got  a  passel  of  fifteen  or 
twenty  thousand  head  —  ain't  counted  'em 
lately,'  says  Mosher,  cool  as  a  hippopota 
mus;  and  there  we  sot  speechless,  knowing 
as  we  did  that  he  hadn't  a  steer  to  his  name. 
'  I've  looked  at  some  stock,'  says  the  Brit 
isher,  *  but  the  prices  seem  to  be  too  high.' 
'  I'll  make  that  all  right,'  says  Mosher,  and 
then  he  names  a  figure  per  head  about  half 
what  good  stock  was  worth;  and  we  con 
tinued  to  set  speechless,  or  mostly  so,  mak 
ing  quiet  bets  that  he  couldn't  deliver  the 
goods;  but  he  did,  and  I  reckon  he  could 
a-been  delivering  of  'em  yet,  if  he'd  a-wanted 
to. 

"Mosher  still  had  the  heft  of  the  $4000 
he  had  touched  the  Boston  man  for,  and  he 
just  rid  out  about  ten  miles,  and  bought  a 
few  hundred  head  of  good  stock,  and  made 
some  arrangements.  Then  the  next  day  he 
took  the  Britisher  and  his  friend  out  and 
planted  'em  on  the  edge  of  some  under 
brush  a  little  ways  from  a  small  butte,  and 
then  says  he,  '  Now,  Mr.  Britisher,  I'll  just 
have  that  there  stock  driv  by  here,  and  we'll 
16 


MEN  OF  MARK 


inspect  'em  and  count  'em,  and  then  you 
can  just  do's  you  please  about  taking  'em/ 
Then  the  men  he'd  made  arrangements  with 
begun  to  drive  the  cattle  by  in  a  long  string 
between  where  they  was  and  the  butte;  and 
Mosher  and  the  Britisher  and  his  friend  sot 
there  on  their  hosses  and  looked  at  'em,  and 
counted  'em,  till  some  fifteen  or  sixteen 
thousand  had  trooped  along,  and  Mosher 
said  that  was  all;  and  they  rode  back,  and 
the  Britisher  paid  the  money,  mighty  tickled 
at  his  bargain;  after  which  Mosher  went 
away,  giving  out  that  he  was  going  to  Cali 
fornia  for  his  health,  his  nerves  being  shat 
tered,  though  there  wa'n't  no  particular  sign 
of  it.  Leastways  the  Britisher  didn't  take 
that  view  of  it  when  he  found  there  was  only 
four  or  five  hundred  head  of  the  stock,  the 
arrangemented  men  having  been  hustling 
'em  through  the  chaparral  and  round  the 
butte  on  a  dead  run,  so  that  each  of  the  crit 
ters  had  gone  by  and  got  counted  at  least 
ten  times.  But,  being  only  a  furriner,  his 
language  wa'n't  nothing  to  compare  with 
the  Boston  man's,  though  they  said  he  could 
be  heard  over  five  hundred  yards,  and  that, 
considering,  wasn't  so  bad. 
2  17 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"  Then  there  was  Pugsley,  Lawyer  Pugs- 
ley —  he  understood  wot  he  was  here  for. 
The  railroad  company  was  his  meat,  and  he 
always  used  Old  Man  Knight  for  bait. 
Finally  the  company  give  him  $500  to  leave 
town  and  settle  on  a  rival  line,  and  it  'ud 
been  money  in  the  company's  pocket  if  it 
had  done  it  sooner.  When  Pugsley  got  at 
a  petit  jury  on  a  damage  case  agin  a  cor 
poration,  the  court-house  janitor  always  just 
sent  out  and  got  a  bale  of  pocket-handker 
chiefs  for  the  twelve  men,  so's  to  save  the 
floor  from  getting  all  sloppy.  The  sheriff 
knowed  that  Pugsley  was  reg'larly  bound  to 
make  'em  cry  'fore  he  got  through  with  'em. 
'Silence  in  the  court!'  the  jedge  used  to 
holler;  'the  jury  mustn't  cry  out  loud. 
No.  4,  stop  that  boohooing!' 

"Pugsley  was  the  making  of  Old  Man 
Knight.  The  old  man  goes  'round  now 
with  his  hair  sticking  out  a  hole  in  his  hat 
and  his  shoes  tied  up  with  bits  of  wire,  but 
when  Pugsley  was  here  he  wore  a  hair- 
tight  hat  and  congress  gaiters.  The  old 
man  just  couldn't  go  near  the  railroad  with 
out  something  happening.  'Fore  he'd  ride 
ten  mile  his  thumb  would  get  catched,  or 
18 


MEN  OF  MARK 

his  toe  nipped,  or  something  would  happen, 
and  there  he  was.  Pugsley  would  take  it 
up,  on  shares,  of  course  —  and  the  jury, 
a-swabbing  its  eyes  and  a-wiping  its  nose, 
would  find  for  the  plaintiff.  It  begun  with 
the  old  man's  sorrel  hoss.  In  his  prime  that 
hoss  was  prob'bly  worth  $12.  There  was 
a  graderal  bear  movement  in  the  hoss  till 
he  got  down  so's  he  was  worth  considerable 
less  than  nothing.  He  just  stood  in  the 
stable  and  et  his  head  off  from  day  to  day, 
the  old  man  being  too  lazy  to  dispose  of 
him.  Finally  he  took  sick,  and  then  the 
old  man  seen  he'd  got  to  do  something,  so 
he  led  him  away  down  the  railroad  track, 
his  intention  being  to  shoot  him.  Somehow 
a  train  struck  him  and  killed  him,  and  the 
old  man  come  back  tickled  because  he  had 
got  out  of  the  job.  Pugsley  heard  of  it, 
went  to  the  old  man,  told  him  he  had  been 
outraged,  took  the  case,  sued  the  company, 
and  the  jury,  all  wet  a-looking  at  the  picture 
of  a  poor,  helpless  feller-citizen,  whose  fam- 
bly  nag  and  sole  support  had  been  snatched 
away  by  a  heartless  corporation,  brought  in 
a  verdict  for  $200  damages. 

"  But  the  biggest  case  Pugsley  ever  pulled 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

off  was  when  the  company  busted  the  old 
man's  back.  You  see,  the  old  scoundrel 
was  the  laziest  man  that  ever  tired  himself 
out  resting.  Never  done  a  stroke  of  work 
in  his  life.  Never  thought  of  working. 
Never  dreamt  of  it.  The  igee  of  working 
never  in  his  whole  long  life  popped  into  his 
mind.  Used  to  go  over  to  the  depot  at 
about  9  o'clock  and  wait  for  the  n-o'clock 
passenger.  Always  stood  and  leaned  agin 
the  east  end  of  the  building  with  his  back 
and  waited.  After  the  n-o'clock  passenger 
had  come  he  would  wait  for  the  12.30 
freight,  eating  a  little  crackers  and  cheese 
he  had  stopped  here  at  Shanks's  and  hooked 
on  the  way  over.  When  the  freight  had 
gone  he  would  wait  for  the  2.15  down  pas 
senger.  After  that  he  would  linger  for  the 
4-o'clock  up  freight.  Then  he'd  keep  on 
leaning  till  5,  or  mebby  half  past,  kinder 
hoping  for  an  extra,  but  if  it  didn't  come 
he'd  make  a  big  effort,  straighten  up,  say 
he  'lowed  the  country  was  going  to  the  dogs 
if  we  didn't  have  more  greenbacks,  and  then 
p'int  for  home  by  way  of  Shanks's.  Done 
this  reg'lar  from  the  ist  of  March  till  No 
vember  3Oth.  Got  took  with  cramps  one 
20 


MEN  OF  MARK 

morning  and  didn't  get  over  in  time  for  the 
1 1 -o'clock  passenger.  Engineer  missed  him 
as  he  come  round  the  bend,  socked  on  the 
brakes,  and  stopped  down  a  hundred  yards. 
Station  agent  had  to  go  down  and  tell  him 
it  was  all  right  'fore  he'd  come  on. 

"  Well,  one  summer  the  company  decided 
to  move  its  depot  up  nearer  the  water-tank. 
Got  it  all  ready  one  day  and  hitched  twelve 
mules  on  the  west  end.  Of  course  the  old 
man  was  in  his  place  agin  the  east  end. 
The  drivers  started  the  mules,  yanked  along 
the  building,  and  naturally  down  went  the 
old  man  on  his  back.  That  afternoon  he 
brought  suit  agin  the  railroad  company 
through  Pugsley  for  $5000  damages.  When 
the  trial  come  on  it  was  a  great  day  for 
Pugsley.  Had  the  old  man  there  on  a 
stretcher  with  two  doctors  and  an  eddicated 
nurse.  '  Gentlemen  of  the  jury,'  says  Pugs 
ley,  'what  did  this  here  low-lived,  leather- 
souled  corporation  do?  Snatched  away  the 
natural  support  of  my  client  and  your  feller- 
townsman!  Sneaked  up  and  without  doo 
warning  attached  and  hitched  on  twelve  base 
mules,  knowing  full  well  that  my  client  was 
in  position,  and  then  yanked  away  its  depot 

21 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

from  behind  my  innercent  and  unsuspect 
ing  client,  allowing  him  to  fall  to  the  ground 
and  break  his  spiral  colyum  in  two  places! 
Gentlemen  of  the  jury,  can  such  things  be 
and  overcome  us  like  a  thunder-cloud? 
This  company  is  a  common  carrier.  By 
holding  up  my  client  once  it  had  entered 
into  an  agreement  to  hold  him  up  again.  By 
not  yanking  its  depot  once  it  had  entered 
into  an  agreement  never  to  yank  it.  My  cli 
ent,  as  you  know,  is  a  poor  man,  the  sole 
support  of  a  wife  and  seven  children  and  a 
widdered  mother.  Has  a  plain  private  citizen 
no  rights?  If  things  go  on  thus,  gentlemen 
of  the  jury,  how  long  before  some  corpora 
tion  will  attach  hireling  mules  to  our  beds 
and  snake  'em  from  under  our  helpless 
bodies  in  the  still  watches  of  the  night?  Are 
we  safe  in  this  court-house?  How  do  we 
know  that  twelve  railroad  mules  may  not 
at  this  moment  be  snorting  outside  eager 
to  jerk  us  into  eternity?  What  is  the  an 
swer  of  the  twelve  intelligent  men  I  see  be 
fore  me  to  these  twelve  mules?' 

"  The  jury  awarded  the  damages  without 
leaving  their  seats.     Then  the  company  seen 


22 


MEN  OF  MARK 

it  had  best  compromise  with  Pugsley  and 
get  him  off  its  line. 

"  But  all  the  jayhawkers  that  come  out 
here  ain't  good  business  men,  not  by  a  long 
shot.  There  was  Buckminster.  Can't  just 
tell  wot  Buckminster  might  a-done  at  busi 
ness  if  he'd  ever  got  a  start,  but  he  was  so 
onlucky  that  he  couldn't  get  within  forty 
rods  of  business.  He  was  the  onluckiest 
man  I  ever  knowed,  and  I've  knowed 
a-many  onlucky  men  too,  having  made  a 
kind  of  study  of  'em,  so  to  speak.  But  this 
here  Buckminster  just  naturally  laid  over 
anything  7  ever  seen  or  heered  tell  of  in  the 
onlucky  line. 

"  The  fust  day  he  struck  the  Territory  it 
begun.  He  had  a  light  wagon  and  a  team 
of  mules,  and  'lowed  to  start  a  stage  line 
betwixt  American  Eagle  and  Ghost  Prairie. 
Druv  into  town  and  stopped  in  the  Square. 
Each  mule  cocked  his  right  ear  for'ards  and 
his  left  ear  back'ards,  put  his  head  down, 
and  just  as  if  somebody  had  counted  '  One, 
two,  three  —  go! '  for  'em,  or  dropped  a  hat, 
them  mules  began  to  kick  like  all  get  out, 
fust  one  up,  t'other  one  down,  t'other  one 
up,  fust  one  down,  like  a  machine;  and  some 

23 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

o'  the  pieces  of  that  wagon  didn't  fall  for  — 
well,  not  for  —  well,  some  of  'em  never  was 
seen  to  fall,  though  I  s'pose,  of  course,  they 
did  evenchooly  come  down  somewheres. 
Well,  him  and  his  wife  crawled  out,  and  says 
he,  cheerful  as  a  bull-frog,  says  he,  '  I've  got 
the  mules  yet,  anyhow;  I'll  just  hustle  for 
another  wagon';  and  he  started  out  to  do 
it;  and  what  happened  while  he  was  gone? 
Them  mules  walked  over  to  the  town  well, 
pujled  off  the  cover  with  their  teeth,  and 
just  dove  right  in  and  was  drownded. 

"Was  Buckminster  discouraged?  Not  a 
ding-batted  bit.  On  the  contrayry,  he  was 
cheerful  as  a  —  a  —  laying  hen  —  just  like 
a  laying  hen,  gentlemen  —  reminded  every 
body  that  saw  him  of  a  durned  old  cackling, 
laying  hen.  Took  his  wife  and  walked  up 
to  the  hotel.  And  what  do  you  reckon? 
Man  there  cleaned  him  out  of  half  his  money 
by  selling  him  stock  in  a  gold-mine  that 
didn't  exist  —  acchooly  didn't  exist  —  no 
such  thing  —  wasn't  such  a  mine  noivhere, 
nohow;  not  a  salted  mine  even,  which 
mebby  Buckminster  could  of  sold  to  some 
body  else,  and  kept  money  easy  and  in  cir 
culation,  but  a  mine  which  wa'n't  no  mine 
24 


MEN  OF  MARK 

at  all  'cause  there  wa'n't  no  such  thing. 
And  the  man  was  a  stranger  too,  and  lit  out 
with  the  cash,  and  it  never  done  the  town 
no  good. 

"  And  what  did  this  here  Buckminster  do 
next?  Bought  a  house  with  what  he  had 
left.  Cheerful?  Why,  dog  my  cats  —  dog 
all  of  my  cats  —  if  the  feller  didn't  whistle, 
'  Pop  goes  the  weasel '  while  they  was  mak 
ing  out  the  deed  —  and  the  pieces  of  his 
wagon  not  all  down  yet,  and  his  mules 
standing  on  their  heads  in  twenty  feet  of 
water,  and  a  total  stranger  streaking  out  of 
town  with  his  wad !  '  Pop  goes  the  fub- 
gasted  weasel,'  gentlemen,  while  the  lawyer 
was  making  out  the  deed  of  a  five-hundred- 
dollar  house  for  eight  hundred  and  fifty! 
Cheerful  as  a  lop-horned  cow,  I  swear. 

"  Buckminster's  notion  was  to  start  a 
boarding-house.  Might  as  well  of  tried  to 
start  a  shot-tower.  While  he  and  his  wife 
was  marketing,  the  third  day,  a  cyclone 
come  along  and  blew  the  house  galley-west, 
with  every  jim-fizzled  boarder  in  it,  and  rat 
tling  round  like  the  seeds  in  a  dry  gourd. 
Bet  a  peck  of  red  apples  that  house  is  end- 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

over-ending  yet,  with  good  boarders  sifting 
out  the  cracks. 

"  Next?  Went  to  boarding  himself,  and 
got  a  job  on  the  street.  Still  cheerful  — 
say,  whistling  wa'n't  good  enough  now  — 
took  to  singing,  reg'lar.  '  Cap'n  Jenks,' 
'  Sweet  by-and-by,'  '  Old  Joe  stood  at  the 
garden  gate,'  '  Doxology,'  and  all  such 
songs.  Luck  change?  Hardly.  Wife  run 
away  with  a  travelling  dentist.  Said  she 
couldn't  stand  it  no  longer.  What  did  he 
say?  Said  a  wife  wa'n't  a  necessity. 
Argyed  that  wives  was  luxuries.  Let  on 
he  thought  they  was  going  out  of  style. 
Offered  to  bet  $10  the  best-dressed  men 
didn't  have  'em.  And  kept  up  his  pesky 
music.  Took  to  singing  '  Rocked  in  the 
Cradle  of  the  Deep.'  Reckon  he  must  of 
been  thinking  of  his  mules. 

"  Nothing  more  to  lose,  hey?  You  didn't 
know  that  there  horn-swizzled  Phil  Buck- 
minster.  You  bet  there  was  something 
more  for  him  to  lose!  One  day  a  letter 
come  to  the  postmaster  from  back  East, 
where  he  used  to  live,  saying  his  name  wa'n't 
Buckminster  at  all,  but  Tubbs,  Tom  Tubbs, 
I  believe;  that  he'd  changed  it  when  he  had 
26 


MEN  OF  MARK 

to  leave  town  for  setting  the  Baptist  church 
afire,  just  to  see  if  a  Baptist  church  would 
burn,  or  if  it  was  too  wet.  So  there  was 
Philip  Buckminster  without  even  his  name 
left. 

"What'cPe  do  next?  Why,  hang  me, 
there  wa'n't  but  one  thing  for  him  to  do! 
He  went  into  politics,  of  course.  The  peo 
ple  felt  sorry  for  him,  and  elected  him 
County  Clerk.  He's  held  the  office  ever 
since;  yanks  out  his  salary  each  month,  gets 
rid  of  it  like  a  fool,  and  goes  back  to  work. 
And  still  cheerful?  Cheerful,  gentlemen,  as 
a  durned  red-headed  willipus-wallipus  —  or 
more  so." 


Ill 


GREELEY  S  HANDWRITING 

I  had  never  known  a  tramp  printer  of 
sufficient  age  who  had  not  worked  on  the 
New  York  Tribune  in  the  Greeley  days,  and 
who  did  not,  consequently,  have  reminis 
cences  of  the  great  editor's  copy.  With 
this  fact  in  mind  one  evening,  when  old 
Mark  Wallis,  my  compositor,  was  sober, 
and  therefore  in  a  colloquial  mood,  I  gently 
led  up  to  the  subject. 

"  Yes,"  he  said,  with  the  utmost  confi 
dence,  "  I  was  on  the  Tribune  for  a  year  in 
the  early  sixties.  I  never  saw  much  of 
Greeley's  copy,  as  that  was  mostly  set  by 
one  man  —  a  hoary-headed  anachronism, 
who  smoked  a  cob  pipe  with  the  corn  still 
on  it.  He  boasted  that  he  could  read 
Greeley's  copy  at  three  yards  with  one  eye 
shut.  Tangled  and  terrible  as  it  was,  it  was 
said  to  be  really  less  difficult  to  read  when 
taken  in  detail  than  you  might  suppose, 
much  of  its  bad  reputation  having  sprung 
28 


GREELEY  S  HANDWRITING 

from  the  horror  inspired  in  surveying  a 
page  of  it  as  a  whole.  But  whether  diffi 
cult  or  not,  there  were  few  errors  made  in 
setting  it.  I  never  knew  of  an  instance  in 
the  Tribune  office  like  the  one  I  once  met 
with  in  a  small  Ohio  town,  where  the  editor 
was  one  week  obliged  to  put  this  on  his 
first  page,  after  his  second  and  third  had 
been  printed :  '  ^HT*  Erratum :  For  "  Price 
of  Nails,"  in  the  foreign  editorial  on  our 
inside,  read  "  Prince  of  Wales." ' 

"  This  man  of  the  agricultural  pipe,  who 
was  named  Larkway,  and  who,  I  hope  in 
the  interest  of  archaeology,  has  been  pre 
served  in  some  museum,  was  so  much  given 
to  bragging  about  his  ability  to  read  Gree- 
ley's  copy  that  he  was  a  burden  to  the  office. 
There  came  to  be  a  tacit  understanding  that 
an  attempt  must  be  made  to  humble  him; 
but  when  the  attempt  was  made  it  was  prac 
tically  a  failure. 

"  Mr.  Greeley  was  constantly  receiving 
offerings  of  the  products  of  the  earth  from 
rural  admirers,  as  if  he  were  a  sort  of  mod 
ern  Ceres  and  the  Tribune  office  his  temple. 
Sometimes  it  would  be  a  big  melon;  again 
a  prize  squash;  on  another  occasion  a  cham- 

29 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

pion  pumpkin.  From  the  choice  ears  of 
corn  which  he  got,  Larkway  used  to  make 
his  pipes.  Often  he  would  not  even  remove 
the  husks,  and  on  one  occasion  these  caught 
fire  as  he  was  studying  an  obscure  word,  and 
gained  considerable  headway  before  he  no 
ticed  it.  Sometimes  an  aspiring  country 
boy  would  send  Mr.  Greeley  a  whistle  made 
out  of  a  pig's  tail,  just  to  show  that  it  could 
be  done,  despite  the  popular  belief  to  the 
contrary;  and  Larkway  would  take  one  of 
these,  bore  a  hole  through  it,  and  use  it  for 
a  stem  to  his  pipe,  thus  getting,  in  a  crude 
form,  along  with  his  tobacco,  that  Southern 
staple,  hog  and  hominy. 

"  One  day  a  worshipper  in  Herkimer 
County  sacrificed  on  the  Greeley  altar  two 
young  roosters,  alive.  They  were  of  a  new 
strain,  originated  by  the  man,  and  he  had 
named  it  the  '  Go- West  •  breed.  Mr.  Greeley 
was  much  interested  in  the  new  fowls,  and 
gave  the  man  a  good  notice  in  the  agricul 
tural  department,  and  cooped  them  under 
his  desk,  bestowing  upon  them  an  old  straw 
hat  for  their  brooding-place,  since  they  were 
not  large  enough  to  roost. 

"  In  fact,  the  man,  in  his  eagerness  to  pour 

30 


GREELEY'S  HANDWRITING 

out  his  feathery  libation,  had  sent  these 
cockerels  when  they  could  not  have  been 
over  a  month  old.  They  were  so  young 
that  they  required  soft  food,  so  Greeley  used 
to  bring  down  corn  meal  and  mix  it  up  with 
water  for  them.  This  pabulum,  together 
with  the  cockroaches,  which  they  soon 
learned  to  run  to  earth,  constituted  their 
diet,  and  they  prospered  and  grew.  But 
they  had  not  been  in  the  office  a  fortnight 
before  they  developed  a  trick  which  brought 
them  into  disfavor.  They  learned  to  eat 
the  paste.  They  would  hop  up  on  their 
owner's  desk  and  gorge  themselves  from  the 
paste-pot  as  regularly  as  he  went  out,  sel 
dom  leaving  enough  to  stick  a  gumless  post 
age-stamp. 

"  It  was  a  favorite  plan  of  Greeley's  to  clip 
an  item  from  a  loathed  contemporary,  paste 
it  on  the  top  of  a  sheet  of  copy  paper,  and 
then  proceeded  to  tear  the  unfortunate 
author  of  the  paragraph  limb  from 
limb,  beginning  with  the  truculent,  '  You 
lie,  you  villain,  you  lie!'  and  ending 
with  the  crushing,  '  We  don't  want  to 
hear  from  you  again.'  Several  times,  when 
boiling  with  rage  at  something  he  had 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

just  clipped,  he  started  to  dab  it  on  a 
piece  of  paper,  and  found  the  paste-pot 
polished  out  like  a  lamp  chimney,  and  saw 
those  two  roosters  standing  about  in  a  calm 
attitude  almost  ready  to  burst.  He  endured 
it  a  week  for  the  sake  of  the  breed,  but  it 
happened  once  too  often,  and  Greeley  was 
the  one  who  burst.  He  sent  for  the  fore 
man,  and  said  to  him: 

"  'Do  you  see  those  two  confounded 
young  roosters?  They've  eaten  up  my 
paste.  They're  full  of  it.  They're  waiting 
for  me  to  get  some  more.  I  want  you  to 
take  'em  up  stairs,  and  never  let  me  see  'em 
again.' 

"  The  foreman  tucked  a  rooster  under 
either  arm,  and  did  as  he  was  told;  and  thus 
they  came  to  make  their  home  in  the  com 
posing-room. 

"  Here  they  continued  to  prosper,  getting 
plenty  of  cockroaches  and  corn  meal,  with 
an  occasional  snatch  at  the  foreman's  paste- 
pot  ;  and  once  in  a  while  the  galley-boy  used 
to  give  them  a  mouthful  of  news  ink  on  the 
end  of  a  column  rule,  which  seemed  to  agree 
with  them,  though  this,  or  something  else, 
had  a  bad  effect  on  their  tempers,  and  they 

32 


GREELEY  S  HANDWRITING 

began  to  fight  each  other  a  good  deal. 
They  constantly  grew  more  combative, 
until  it  seemed  that,  instead  of  being  called 
the  Go-Wests,  a  more  appropriate  name 
would  have  been  the  On-to-Richmonds. 

u  After  they  had  been  with  us  a  couple  of 
weeks  the  boy  one  day  left  the  ink-roller  of 
the  proof-press  on  the  floor.  One  of  the 
roosters  walked  over  it,  and  then  across  a 
piece  of  white  paper.  The  foreman  saw 
him,  and  a  great  light  burst  in  upon  his 
mind,  which  nearly  stunned  him.  He 
slapped  his  leg  with  his  hand  hard  enough 
to  break  it,  and  shut  his  jaws  together  like 
a  vise  to  keep  from  breaking  out  in  a  vol 
cano  of  laughter.  He  walked  to  his  desk 
as  if  in  a  trance,  keeping  his  eye  on  Lark- 
way.  Before  he  went  home  he  spoke  to  the 
proof-reader  and  one  or  two  others,  and 
they  fractured  their  legs  with  their  hands; 
and  then  they  all  went  off  to  the  hospital 
for  the  night. 

"The  next  afternoon  they  were  back  at 
the  office  two  hours  before  the  usual  time. 
The  foreman  caught  one  rooster  and  the 
proof-reader  the  other,  and  they  took  them 
over  in  the  corner  behind  the  imposing- 

3  33 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

stones.  They  had  previously  sent  the  devil 
down  to  Mr.  Greeley's  room  to  get  a  dozen 
sheets  of  the  paper  he  always  wrote  on. 
These  they  spread  on  the  floor  in  the  form 
of  a  square,  carefully  inked  the  feet  of  the 
fowls,  and  set  them  to  fighting  on  the  copy 
paper.  They  had  just  had  a  meal  of  cock 
roaches,  and  they  went  at  each  other  sav 
agely.  Every  two  or  three  minutes  the  men 
would  take  them  off,  ink  the  bottoms  of 
their  feet,  and  toss  them  into  the  ring  again. 
At  the  end  of  twenty  minutes  every  sheet 
of  the  paper  was  covered  with  their  tracks, 
and  the  foreman  gathered  up  the  pages, 
numbered  them,  and  scrawled  a  head  on  the 
first  one,  '  The  Plain  Duty  of  Congress,'  in 
imitation  of  Greeley's  hand,  marked  the 
whole  '  Brevier  —  Double  Lead,'  and  hung 
it  on  the  copy-hook. 

"  Pretty  soon  the  men  began  to  drop  in, 
but  they  had  all  heard  of  the  game  that  was 
on,  and  picked  around  the  article.  After 
a  while  Larkway  came  lumbering  along. 
He  had  just  made  a  new  pipe  out  of  the 
biggest  ear  of  corn  ever  raised  in  Cayuga 
County,  and  a  particularly  crooked  pig's 
tail  from  Brattleboro,  Vermont,  and  seemed 

34 


GREELEY  S  HANDWRITING 

unusually  pert.  He  started  the  conflagra 
tion  in  his  pipe,  put  on  his  spectacles,  and 
walked  to  the  hook. 

"Hey?  You  fellers  still  soldiering, 
ain't  you? '  he  cried.  '  Still  afraid  of  the  old 
man's  stuff,  hey?  Can't  rastle  it,  can  you? 
Had  to  leave  it  for  old  Larkway,  didn't  you? 
Well,  that's  all  right;  I  like  it.  You  do  me 
a  favor  when  you  leave  it  for  me.' 

"  He  took  it,  walked  over  and  slammed  it 
down  on  his  upper  case,  planted  a  handful 
of  leads  on  the  bottom  of  it,  and  picked  up 
his  stick.  Every  man  in  the  room  held  his 
sides,  and  watched  to  see  the  old  fossil  flab 
bergasted;  but,  by  the  Goddess  of  Truth, 
he  began  to  set  it! 

"  Yes,  Larkway  started  to  set  it.  At  the 
end  of  the  second  line  he  began  to  look  a  lit 
tle  troubled,  laid  down  his  stick,  and  we 
thought  our  moment  of  victory  was  come; 
but  he  only  swore  a  little,  knocked  the  ashes 
out  of  his  pipe,  refilled  it,  lit  it  with  a  husk 
stripped  from  the  outside,  picked  up  his 
stick,  and  went  on.  You  could  have  packed 
every  one  of  us  in  a  hat-box.  The  old  cave- 
dweller  worked  on,  and  never  looked  up 
again  until  he  got  almost  to  the  bottom  of 

35 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES     ' 

the  last  page.  Here  he  stuck,  on  a  place 
where  one  of  the  roosters  had  slapped  down 
the  edge  of  his  wing,  also  inky.  Larkway 
studied  over  it  for  a  long  time,  then  he  said 
to  the  foreman: 

'  Darn  it,  the  best  of  us  get  hung  up  on 
a  word  once  in  a  while.  What's  that,  down 
there?' 

Don't  ask  me,'  said  the  foreman.  '  You 
know  I  can't  read  the  stuff.  Go  down  and 
ask  the  old  man  himself.' 

Larkway  shuffled  out  with  a  long  face, 
carrying  his  pipe  in  one  hand  and  the  copy 
in  the  other.  He  went  into  the  chiefs 
room,  and  said,  in  a  low  tone.  '  Mr.  Gree- 
ley,  I'm  stuck.  What  is  that  word?' 

"  Greeley  snatched  the  sheet  from  his 
hand  impatiently,  studied  it  a  moment,  and 
then  squeaked,  in  his  highest  voice: 

"  '  "  Unconstitutional,"  sir!  Great  Jehos- 
haphat!  it  seems  to  me  sometimes  as  if  this 
office  was  full  of  pesky  college  graduates, 
and  after  I've  given  the  janitor  strict  orders 
not  to  allow  one  of  'em  in  the  building! ' " 


IV 

TALES  OF  TWO  HORSES 

"  He  was  a  middle-sized  man,  with  black 
hair,  and  one  o'  these  here  musstashes  that 
curl  up  at  both  ends,"  said  Mr.  Milo  Bush. 
"  Home-made  curl,  I  took  it.  Said  his  name 
was  Williams;  and  he  was  from  the  East, 
but  of  course  he  wa'n't  to  blame  fer  that. 
We  was  all  willing  to  do  what  we  could  to 
help  him  to  forget  it  and  make  a  man  of 
him.  This  here  coming  from  New  York 
or  Boston  is  a  drawback  —  it's  a  drag  on 
any  man  —  but  he  can  live  it  down  if  he 
really  wants  to.  You  may  doubt  it,  but  I've 
seen  it  done. 

"  Well,  we  was  helpful  to  the  feller  — 
never  asked  him  what  he  had  to  leave  the 
East  fer,  and  planned  to  try  to  learn  him  our 
ways.  We  decided  that  it  was  our  first 
dooty  to  learn  him  to  ride.  Jim  Doty  had 
a  bronco  named  Walking-Beam  which  we 
had  used  on  sev'ral  occasions  before  for  in 
structing  the  Eastern  pilgrim.  In  fact, 

37 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Walking-Beam  wa'n't  used  fer  anything 
else,  since  he  was  a  little  too  tough  fer  even 
the  boys  to  enjoy  riding.  We  made  it  a 
rule  never  to  give  a  tenderfoot  a  lesson  on 
Walking-Beam  without  at  least  two  doctors 
right  on  the  ground;  and  even  then  some 
times  they  didn't  get  the  feller  put  back  to 
gether  right,  though  they  had  been  there 
and  seen  him  shook  to  pieces  and  scattered 
around.  Walking-Beam  was  just  the  buck- 
ingest  boss  that  ever  riz  and  fell.  Why,  you 
might  turn  him  out  loose,  and  s'pose  a  fly 
lit  on  his  back.  Did  he  switch  his  tail  or 
wag  around  his  head?  Not  much;  he  just 
bucked  that  fly  off.  All  the  flies  in  town  got 
so  they  knowed  him,  and  fit  shy  of  him. 
Riding  him  was  just  like  —  why,  there 
wa'n't  no  such  thing  as  riding  him  —  there 
was  getting  on  and  getting  off  —  mounting 
and  demounting,  and  that's  all.  Riding 
that  hoss  consisted  in  climbing  on  and  re 
gaining  consciousness. 

"  Well,  the  second  morning  says  Jim  to 
the  feller,  '  Stranger,  might  I  ask  if  you're 
fond  of  equestrianeous  exercise  —  hossback 
riding,  as  we  say  here? '  '  Ye-as,'  says  Wil 
liams,  slow  like;  '  I've  rid  some.  But  I  un- 
38 


TALES  OF  TWO  HORSES 

derstand  that  you  have  these  here  buck- 
ers?'  'We  do/  says  Jim,  turning  his  hon 
est  bloo  eyes  straight  on  the  feller.  '  Many 
of  'em,  I  regret  to  say.  It  comes  through 
ignorance  —  they  ain't  broke  right,  Mr. 
Williams.  Now  I've  got  a  hoss  I  call 
Feather  Bed.  He's  a  saddlc-hoss  —  that's 
what  he  is.  You  can  depend  on  him.  He's 
always  the  same.  His  gait  —  now,  see  here, 
I  ain't  no  hand  to  brag,  and  I  won't  say  a 
word  about  that  boss's  gait.  But  if  you 
would  like  to  take  him  and  have  a  look  at 
our  bootiful  country  this  morning,  you're 
more'n  welcome.  There  ain't  no  better  hoss 
west  o'  the  Missouri  River  fer  looking  over 
the  country  with,'  and  he  winked  at  us, 
meaning,  of  course,  that  you  got  throwed 
so  high  that  you  had  a  good  view. 

"  The  feller  seemed  pleased,  and  said  he'd 
be  glad  of  the  chance;  so  Jim  went  down 
and  saddled  up  the  Beam  and  led  him  out. 
He  never  had  no  objections  to  a  saddle 
when  there  was  a  prospect  that  a  man  was 
going  to  get  on  it,  so  he  come  along,  'pear- 
ing  sleepy  like.  Jim  says:  'Here  you  be, 
Mr.  Williams.  If  he  don't  travel  just  to  suit 
you,  speak  to  him.'  '  All  right,  Mr.  Doty,' 

39 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

says  Williams,  walking  up.  The  doctors 
pushed  to  the  front,  there  being  a  passel  of 
about  a  hundred  of  us  idjits,  and  the  feller 
put  his  foot  into  the  sturrup  and  swung  up 
on  him  easy  and  graceful. 

"  I'd  saw  Walking-Beam  in  a  state  of 
eruption  before,  but  I  must  say  I  never  seen 
him  make  such  a  savage  start  as  he  did  this 
time.  When  his  back  went  up  it  was  like 
the  explosion  of  a  powder-mill.  And  that 
feller  —  well,  there  wa'n't  no  way  of  meas 
uring  how  high  he  did  go,  but  if  anybody 
had  had  their  watch  out  they  might  of  timed 
his  fall.  But  immejitly  after  he  did  get 
down  you  could  of  knocked  us  all  over  with 
a  mint-julep  straw.  That  feller  lit  on  his 
feet  —  and  where?  On  the  boss's  back! 
Lit  there  like  a  bird.  Folded  his  arms  and 
stood  there  like  a  statute.  Smiled,  and  done 
as  he  had  been  told  —  spoke  to  that  living 
yearthquake  — '  Steady,  there,  boy,  steady ' 
—  just  like  that.  Well,  at  first  we  thought 
Walking-Beam  was  too  dumfounded  to 
move  again;  but  he  wa'n't.  He  looked  up 
and  seen  that  smiling  image  on  his  back, 
then  he  just  unlimbered  and  made  the  effort 
of  his  life.  For  ten  minutes  his  motions 
40 


TALES  OF  TWO  HORSES 


just  simply  jarred  the  winders  in  the  whole 
town.  And  all  the  time  that  feller  loafing 
around  on  his  bare  back,  the  saddle  having 
gone  up  at  the  first  h'ist,  and  not,  so  fur  as  I 
know,  having  come  down  yet.  And  not 
satisfied  with  standing  there,  but  he  must 
dance  a  little,  and  turn  a  couple  o'  hand 
springs,  and  stand  on  his  head.  And  then 
he  took  out  some  tobacker  and  rolled  a 
cigarette,  and  lit  it,  and  begun  to  smoke, 
and  to  blow  rings  —  you  may  pizen  me  with 
ice-water  if  he  didn't.  And  when  the  hoss 
at  last  fell  down  from  being  exhausted,  he 
steps  off,  and  says  he  to  Jim :  '  Mr.  Doty, 
that's  a  fine  beast  you've  got  there.  Sort 
of  a  lady's  hoss,  I  take  it.  Make  a  good 
fambly  nag; '  and  he  walks  over  to  the  hotel. 

"Circus  man?  That's  what  he  was.  And 
it  broke  up  our  sport  with  Walking-Beam 
too,  'cause  when  Jim  went  to  him  he  was 
stark  dead.  The  doctors  held  a  sort  of  an 
otopsy  on  him,  and  found  his  organs  all 
right,  so  they  just  reckoned  he  died  of  grief 
and  mortification. 

"  And  while  we're  on  the  subject  of  hosses 
I'll  just  relate  a  little  pussonal  incident  about 
one  of  'em,"  went  on  Mr.  Bush.  "  You've 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

heered  of  Ajax,  the  celebrated  Kentucky 
runner,  of  course.  I  once  owned  a  son  of 
his.  I  called  him  Bjax.  Fastest  hoss  ever 
brought  to  the  Territory.  Too  fast.  It 
would  a-been  money  in  my  pocket  if  he'd 
had  only  three  legs.  Where  I  made  my 
mistake  was  in  not  keeping  a  ball-and-chain 
fastened  to  one  foot.  Ought  to  a-kept  him 
hobbled. 

"  I  bought  that  hoss  Bjax  with  my  hard 
earnings,"  he  continued,  looking  off  sadly, 
oblivious  of  the  notorious  fact  that  he  had 
never  done  a  day's  work  in  his  life. 
"  Bought  him  with  money  which  I  had 
saved.  Money  which  I  had  laid  up  agin  the 
time  when  I  should  be  old  and  unable  to 
work.  But  it  all  went,  and  it  has  staid 
went,  and  the  hour  when  I  should  rest  is 
come,  but  there  is  no  rest  for  me.  Some 
times,  when  I'm  alone,  I  say  to  myself,  firm, 
just  like  this:  '  Keep  still,  sad  heart! ' 

"  Well,  I  bought  this  Bjax  just  to  show 
the  boys.  They  thought  they  had  hosses 
that  could  run,  but  I  wanted  to  show  them 
that  their  hosses  was  really  stationary 
hosses,  rooted  down  to  the  spot.  I  says  to 
'em,  '  I  am  sending  for  a  movable  hoss  —  a 
42 


TALES  OF  TWO  HORSES 

self-propelling  hoss  —  a  hoss  that  goes 
alone  —  not  a  animal  that  has  to  be  warped 
along  with  a  house-moving  windlass,  and 
men  putting  their  shoulders  to  him  and 
pushing  behind.'  It  took  all  my  savings  — 
the  savings  of  forty  years  of  toil  —  but  I  got 
the  hoss. 

"  It  was  a  proud  day  for  me  when  that 
hoss  come.  I  took  him  right  over  to  the 
track,  and  I  showed  'em  that  I  was  right. 
Bjax  was  fast.  He  beat  every  hoss  in  town. 
A  great  igee  struck  me  —  to  take  him 
around  on  the  fall  racing  circuit,  and  make 
some  money  and  get  back  my  savings.  I 
knew  there  was  nothing  in  the  Territory 
could  keep  up  with  him.  My  heart  beat 
gayly.  Says  I,  '  Old  man,  Fortune  is  at 
your  door,  a-taking  off  her  gum  shoes  and 
preparing  to  stay.' 

"  I  had  just  said  this,  and  also,  '  Tell  me 
not  in  mournful  slumbers,  life  is  but  an 
empty  dream,'  when  up  steps  a  well-dressed 
young  man,  and  says  he, '  Sah,'  says  he,  just 
like  that — '  sah,  may  I  have  the  privilege 
of  admiring  your  hoss?'  'Wade  in, 
stranger/  says  I.  He  looks  over  Bjax,  his 

43 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

eyes  getting  soft  and  tender,  and  then  I'll 
be  snaked  if  he  didn't  bust  right  out  crying. 
Then  he  wipes  his  eyes,  and  says  he :  '  Sab, 
do  not  laugh  at  these  tears.  Them  are  not 
tears  of  weakness.  Them  tears  come  from 
the  heart.  I  am  touched/  and  he  begins 
to  sniffle  again.  '  I  know  how  it  is/  says 
I,  swallering  a  great  lump  in  my  throat. 
'  Manly  tears  like  them  are  all  O  K.  You 
are  touched.  Lay  right  down  on  the 
ground,  young  man,  and  have  it  out.'  '  No, 
no/  says  he;  '  it  is  past.  The  storm  is  over. 
My  heart  was  full,  and  she  overflowed  — 
that  was  all.  Sah,  I  am  a  Kentuckian!' 
'  I'm  sorry  it  is  so  small/  says  I,  pulling  out 
my  pint  flask,  '  but  you're  welcome.  Finish 
it  up,  and  I'll  send  for  some  more.'  '  No, 
no/  says  he;  '  not  at  present.  My  emotions 
even  now  threaten  to  overmaster  me.  Let 
me  simply  admire  your  hoss  —  your  Ken 
tucky  boss.  An  exile  from  home,  cut  off 
from  ancestral  halls,  this  is  the  first  Ken 
tucky  hoss  I've  seen  for  five  years.  Sah,  I 
am  touched/ 

"  Well,  I  told  him  to  go  ahead  and  ad 
mire  till  he  thought  he'd  got  enough,  and 

44 


TALES  OF  TWO  HORSES 


he  thanked  me,  and  kept  walking  round 
Bjax,  and  feeling  of  him,  and  patting  him, 
and  all  the  time  a-saying  he  was  touched. 
Then  he  says:  '  Sah,  would  you  mind  if  I 
mounted  your  hoss  for  one  turn  around 
the  track?  Riding  was  formerly  my  de 
light.  Fox-hunting  was  my  favorite  sport. 
Will  them  happy  days  ever  come  again? 
Sah,  I  have  not  been  so  touched  since  a 
crool,  mistaken  father  druv  me  from  his 
door/  '  Hop  on,'  says  I.  '  Hop  right  on/ 
And  he  done  so,  and  pranced  Bjax  round 
me  once  or  twice,  and  then  galloped  off, 
easy  like,  down  the  track;  and  when  he  got 
to  the  first  quarter,  he  turned  round  in  the 
saddle,  graceful,  and  waved  his  hand  and 
threw  me  a  kiss,  at  the  same  time  lifting 
the  hoss  right  over  the  fence,  and  starting 
off  across  the  perairie  like  a  bloo  streak,  and 
me  yelling  bloody  murder  for  help.  Well, 
every  man  that  had  a  hoss  started  after  him, 
with  me  follering  along  on  foot,  still  yelling 
in  a  general  way;  but  they  might  as  well 
a-chased  a  zigzag  of  chain-lightning  going 
end  over  end.  They  lost  sight  of  the  feller 
and  Bjax  in  twenty  minutes.  Then  they 
45 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

come  back.  I  was  laying  on  my  back  on 
the  perairie,  my  jaw  still  moving  faintly, 
but  little  or  no  yell  coming  forth.  '  Old 
man,'  says  somebody,  'wot's  the  matter?' 
'  I  am  touched,'  says  L" 


FOG 


"You  are  late,"  said  Judge  Crabtree  to 
his  nephew,  as  that  young  man  came  into 
the  office,  looking  wet  and  bedraggled. 

"Got  caught  by  the  fog,"  he  answered 
"Ferry-boat  drifted  about,  bellowing  like 
a  wild  bull,  pawing  up  the  water,  and  dodg 
ing  other  boats,  also  bellowing  and 
pawing." 

The  Judge  leaned  back,  put  his  feet  on 
his  desk,  and  held  his  pen  between  his 
thumbs.  Then  he  said: 

"Speaking  of  getting  caught  in  the  fog 
reminds  me  of  when  I  used  to  live  on  Staten 
Island  myself.  The  only  thing  that  can 
navigate  a  Staten  Island  fog  is  a  Staten 
Island  mosquito.  They  seem  to  be  water 
proof.  I  have  an  idea  that  they  oil  them 
selves  every  day,  like  a  duck.  They  are 
also  endowed  with  some  sort  of  fog-pene 
trating  eyes,  which  make  it  just  as  easy 
for  them  to  move  about  when  it  is  foggy 
47 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

as  when  it  is  clear.  You  never  see  a  Staten 
Island  mosquito  slowing  down  to  half-speed 
on  account  of  fog,  or  hear  of  one  missing 
his  landing  on  the  back  of  the  summer 
boarder's  neck.  I  once  saw  a  young  man 
steal  out  of  the  back  basement  door  during 
a  heavy  fog  and  try  to  escape  them.  He 
was  the  ex-captain  of  a  college  football 
team.  He  wore  a  light  fog-colored  suit  to 
disguise  himself,  and  ran  for  the  ferry-boat 
like  a  frightened  wolf.  It  was  only  four 
blocks,  but  twenty-three  mosquitoes  made 
a  safe  landing  on  him,  and  eight  others 
buzzed  around  his  head,  nipped  at  his  hat 
band,  and  hummed  leisurely  away,  evidently 
having  dined  previously. 

"But  what  I  started  to  tell  was  a  fog 
story,  not  a  mosquito  story.  In  those  days 
the  fogs  were  heavier  than  they  are  now, 
and  they  lasted  longer.  In  fact — " 

"  Judge,"  interrupted  his  partner,  "  is  this 
going  to  be  truth  or  fiction?" 

"  Truth,"  replied  the  Judge,  with  decision. 
"  But  it  will  bring  home  to  you  as  few  things 
can  that  truth  is  stranger  than  fiction.  As 
I  was  trying  to  say,  the  fogs  then  were 
heavier  than  they  are  now,  and  they  were 
48 


THE   JUDGE    DISCOURSES    OF    FOG 


FOG 

a  good  deal  tougher,  and  had  better  wear 
ing  qualities.  In  fact,  those  fogs  wouldn't 
blow  away  at  all,  as  the  present  ones  will, 
because  the  wind  couldn't  get  through  them. 
The  only  way  they  were  ever  dissipated  was 
by  its  beginning  to  rain  heavily,  and  sort 
of  washing  and  melting  them  away  and 
wearing  them  out,  like  rain  on  a  snow-bank. 
I  recollect  one  morning  in  the  spring  that 
I  boarded  the  boat,  as  usual,  for  this  city. 
It  was  about  nine  o'clock  and  extremely 
foggy.  I  remember  thinking,  as  I  came 
down  the  street  to  the  ferry-house,  that 
there  seemed  to  be  a  faint  suggestion  of  a 
light  cream-colored  tint  to  the  fog,  and  I 
remarked  to  a  neighbor  whom  I  heard 
walking  near,  that  it  seemed  to  me  as  if  I 
were  moving  about  on  the  bottom  crust 
of  an  immense  custard  pie.  However,  we 
both  got  on  the  boat,  or  at  least  I  did,  and 
I  suppose  he  did,  though  I  didn't  hear  any 
thing  more  of  him. 

"  It  was  impossible  to  see  a  boat's  length, 
and  all  we  could  hear  was  the  tolling  of  the 
Robbins  Reef  bell-buoy  and  the  groaning 
of  an  occasional  whistle  with  a  frog  in  its 
throat  off  in  the  darkness  somewhere. 

4  49 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Then  our  whistle,  also  with  a  frog  in  its 
throat,  groaned,  and  we  got  out  of  the  slip, 
with  a  procession  of  piles  on  either  side 
gliding  back  like  a  line  of  hurrying  ghosts 
who  were  afraid  of  getting  their  feet  wet. 
After  a  half-dozen  revolutions  of  the  paddle- 
wheels  every  man  on  board  might  as  well 
have  been  blind.  The  captain  put  deck 
hands  outside  the  chains,  who  reached  over 
the  bow  and  felt  out  in  the  fog  for  ships, 
islands,  continents,  and  other  obstructions; 
and  he  stood  up  forward  of  the  pilot-house 
himself,  and  peered  straight  before  him;  but 
he  might  as  well  have  looked  into  the  coal- 
bunkers.  We  were  making  about  half- 
speed,  and  after  giving  the  reef  a  respectful 
berth,  we  headed,  as  we  thought,  for  the 
city.  About  every  forty  seconds  our  whistle 
would  groan  dismally,  and  we  could  hear 
others  out  in  the  fog  at  varying  distances 
taking  on  in  a  similar  distressed  manner. 

"  We  had  been  out  about  twenty  minutes 
when  a  tramp  steamer,  big  and  rusty,  with 
the  smoke-stack  where  the  flag-staff  should 
have  been,  loomed  up  right  across  our  bows. 
We  tried  to  back,  and  a  peppery  little  tug, 
one  of  those  little  Skye-terrier  tugs  which 


FOG 

are  always  getting  in  the  way,  began  to  ki-yi 
right  under  our  stern.  Then  a  bark  at 
anchor,  the  men  at  the  pumps  pumping  fog 
out  of  the  hold,  rose  up  on  our  port,  and 
a  hulking  lighter  with  a  sail  made  of 
sponges  bumped  into  our  starboard  as  it 
drifted  out  with  the  tide.  Two  or  three 
other  craft  trod  on  our  toes  during  the  next 
five  minutes,  and  we  passengers  just  drew 
in  a  couple  of  quarts  of  fog  apiece  and  held 
it  till  the  trouble  was  over.  But  nothing 
serious  happened.  The  tramp  steamer  went 
up  into  the  fog;  the  bark  went  down 
into  the  water;  the  lighter  rolled  over 
and  went  off  with  its  rudder  for  a  sail;  and 
the  hot-tempered  little  tug,  after  abusing  us 
in  screams  of  steam  and  defying  us  in 
snorts  of  smoke,  went  scolding  away,  look 
ing  for  a  chance  to  get  run  over  again,  and 
we  found  ourselves  all  clear  once  more.  But 
during  the  tangle  the  signal  bells  in  our 
engine  room  seemed  to  be  ringing  a  New 
Year's  chime.  I  don't  think  I  ever  heard 
so  many  orders  given  to  an  engineer  in  the 
same  length  of  time  before  nor  since.  But 
when  we  got  out  of  the  crowd  the  captain 
ordered  the  pilot  to  bear  straight  ahead,  and 

51 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

the  pilot  signalled  the  engineer  ahead  at 
half-speed,  and  we  were  off  again,  and  we 
passengers  once  more  began  to  inhale  reg 
ular  quantities  of  fog. 

"  Now,  here  comes  the  marvellous  part  of 
this  thing.  At  noon  we  were  still  pushing 
through  the  fog,  with  no  sight  of  New  York 
or  land.  At  three  o'clock  we  were  still  bur 
rowing.  When  it  got  dark  at  seven,  as  I 
hope  for  happiness,  we  were  still  at  it.  But 
this  is  not  all.  As  I'm  a  living  sinner, 
twelve  hours  later,  at  seven  the  next  morn 
ing,  we  were  still  shouldering  our  way 
through  that  everlasting  fog,  with  no 
glimpse  of  shore.  You  may  better  believe 
that  there  was  a  mad  lot  of  folks  on  that 
boat.  The  crew,  from  the  captain  down  to 
the  flute-player  in  the  Italian  band,  who 
blew  fog  through  his  flute  till  he  wore  it 
out,  simply  raved  and  tore,  while  we  pas 
sengers  drowned  out  the  roar  of  the  whistle 
with  foggy  imprecations.  We  abused  the 
ferry  company,  denounced  the  weather,  and 
found  fault  with  all  animate  creation,  ending 
by  quarreling  among  ourselves  on  politics, 
religion,  and  the  size  of  the  national  debt. 

"  Since  about  five  o'clock  in  the  afternoon 

52 


FOG 

we  had  been  going  at  a  rate  which  fairly 
made  us  dizzy,  as  at  that  hour  the  captain 
had  got  desperate  and  ordered  full  speed, 
and  directed  the  pilot  to  buzz  his  wheel 
around  in  first  one  direction  and  then  the 
other,  and  get  somewhere  or  anywhere.  So 
all  night  the  engines  throbbed  and  groaned, 
and  the  pilot  ported  his  helm,  and  star 
boarded  his  helm,  and  got  his  helm  by  the 
throat  and  held  it  half-way  between,  and 
otherwise  acted  insane.  We  concluded  that 
we  were  out  in  the  broad  Atlantic,  and  one 
scientific  passenger  began  to  take  observa 
tions  for  the  Gulf  Stream  by  jabbing  his 
umbrella  over  the  side  and  then  feeling  of  it 
for  warm  water.  Another  impressionable 
man  from  New  Brighton  said  he  saw  a  fly 
ing-fish,  and  still  another  thought  he 
scented  icebergs. 

"  But  the  ocean  idea  wasn't  tenable,  after 
all,  because  we  could  still  hear  the  whistles 
bellowing  all  around  us.  But  at  seven  o'clock 
in  the  morning,  just  as  the  captain  was 
threatening  to  cut  away  the  rudder  entirely 
and  tie  an  Italian  on  the  safety-valve,  the 
fog  lifted,  and  the  difficulty  became  clear; 
and  it  was  a  simple  thing,  after  all.  While 

53 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

we  were  tangled  up  with  the  other  vessels 
the  engineer  had  got  excited,  and  when  sig 
nalled  to  go  forward,  had  lost  his  head,  and 
started  the  port  paddle-wheel  ahead  and  the 
starboard  paddle-wheel  astern;  and  for 
twenty-one  hours  we  had  been  lying  there 
off  Bedlow's  Island,  spinning  around  like 
a  kitten  chasing  its  own  tail." 


VI 

THE   PASSING  OF   GEN^L   JACKSON 

We  were  plowing  along  through  the 
muddy  water  of  the  river  at  the  rate  of 
speed  usual  to  a  stern-wheel  steamboat 
when  they  came  and  sat  down  close  to  me 
—  so  close  that  it  was  impossible  not  to  hear 
their  conversation.  Indeed,  they  must  have 
known  that  they  were  overheard,  as  the 
deck  was  brightly  illuminated  by  the  full 
moon  looking  down  over  the  flat-topped 
bluffs. 

"  I  s'pose  things  are  jogging  'long  just 
'bout  the  same  'round  Poplar  Mound,  hey?" 
said  the  younger  of  the  two. 

"Just  'bout.  Not  much  change.  Sarah 
Ann  Smead  married  Ike  Patchley's  son  last 
spring." 

"How  is  the  old  man?" 

"  Old  Patchley?  Chipper.  Give  the  bride 
a  calf.  Rather  more  than  Sarah  Ann  ex 
pected,  I  reckon.  She'd  just  about  been 

55 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

counting  on  that  old  rattle-trap  buggy  of 
his'n,  I  think.     Well,  the  calf  up  V  got  a 
piece  of  punkin  stuck  in  its  throat  a  week 
ago,  and  laid  down  and  just  died,  so  she 
might  better  a-got  the  buggy,  if  one  hind 
wheel  is  bigger  >n  the  other.    The  old  man 
is  just  the  same.     Boun'  to  stand  in    with 
everybody.     Going  to  do  the  right  thing  if 
it  kills  him.     Dunno  if  he  kept  a  fighting 
cock  when  you  lived  there  or  not,  but  he 
has  of  late  years.     That  there  rooster  has 
been  his  only  relaxation,  as  you  may  say. 
The  affection  betwixt  the  old  man  and  that 
blame',  old,  long-legged  red  game-cock  was 
touching  to  see.     They  was  like  brothers, 
so  everybody  said.     For   years    them    two 
wa'n't  scarcely  separated  'cept  nights,  and  I 
reckon  if  the  old  man  could  a-kept  on  a  roost 
that  he'd  a-flew  up  ev'ry  evening  alongside 
o'  GenYal  Jackson.    That  was  the  name  o' 
the  critter  —  Gen'ral  Jackson.    He  just  had 
the  longest  legs,   and   the  rcachcncst  neck. 
Clean  cut  as  the  ace  of  spades  and  a  temper 
like  a  buzzsaw.    And  spurs  —  well,  he  just 
walked  wide-legged  and  revolved  one  spur 
round  the  other  spur.  The  old  man  'sociated 
with  the  rooster  so  much  that  he  come  to 
56 


THE    PASSING   OF    GEN^L    JACKSON 

walk  just  like  him.  Some  folks  thought 
they  got  so  towards  the  last  that  they  kind 
o'  resembled  each  other  in  their  faces,  and 
I  reckon,  on  the  whole,  that  the  Gen'ral 
did  favor  the  old  gent  some.  You  didn't  see 
it  in  the  features  so  much,  but  their  expres 
sions  was  similar. 

"  Well,  you  know  how  it  was  with  the 
old  man  —  boun'  to  do  the  right  thing  and 
be  up  on  soci'ty  doings.  He  heard  one  day 
that  the  new  minister  was  coming,  an'  he 
just  says  to  his  wife  that  they'd  have  him 
to  their  house  to  dinner  the  first  Sunday. 
His  idee  was  to  get  ahead  of  old  Johnson's 
folks.  They'd  got  ahead  on  the  school 
teacher,  and  the  congressman  of  the  dees- 
trick  when  he  was  stumping  it,  and  old 
Patchley  was  bound  they  shouldn't  rope  in 
the  preacher,  too.  So  when  the  elder 
hopped  off  the  stage,  Patchley  made  an 
app'intment  with  him  for  dinner  for  the 
very  next  Sunday. 

"  Saturday  morning  the  old  man  shoul 
dered  his  gun  and  went  out  after  game  for 
next  day's  dinner.  Well,  he  didn't  have  no 
luck  —  come  back  without  a  thing.  Come 
back  late,  tired  out,  plum  beat.  Hadn't 

57 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

seen  a  coon  nor  a  possum,  nor  even  a  wood- 
chuck,  nor  a  pa'tridge,  nor  nothing.  Hadn't 
seen  a  track  of  one,  nor  a  hide  nor  hair, 
nor  a  feather,  nor  heard  one  holler,  nor 
heard  no  echo  of  one  hollering  'way  off 
somewheres.  He  sot  his  gun  down  with  a 
heavy  heart  when  he  got  home.  But  he 
wa'n't  the  man  to  throw  up  his  hand  —  not 
much.  No,  sir!  He  traveled  right  down  to 
old  Doosnike's  market  and  struck  the  old 
man  for  a  roast  —  on  credit  —  you  know 
old  Patchley  never  was  very  forehanded. 
But  old  Doosnike  shook  his  head.  The  old 
man  offered  to  take  a  chunk  of  steak,  or  a 
boiling  piece,  or  a  slice  of  ham,  and  finally 
he  got  down  to  liver,  but  Doosnike  wouldn't 
hear  of  it  —  said  the  old  man  owed  too 
much  already.  But  Patchley  didn't  give  up 
—  couldn't,  with  that  minister  just  hanging 
over  his  head.  He  went  'round  and  tackled 
all  his  neighbors  for  a  hunk  of  fresh  meat, 
or  a  chicken,  or  something.  But  he  owed 
'em  all,  and  he  didn't  get  a  thing  —  nothing 
but  cold  shoulder.  Then  he  went  home  and 
sot  down  on  the  end  of  the  leach  and  bust 
into  tears.  His  wife  come  out  with  the  lan 
tern.  '  Mariar,'  says  he,  *  the  wuss  has  come 

58 


THE    PASSING   OF    GEN^L    JACKSON 

to  the  wust.  Them  tears  which  has  wet  up 
the  ground  all  'round  here  are  the  fust  I 
have  shed  for  40  years  —  mebby  more. 
Gimme  the  axe  and  that  lantern  —  don't 
stand  there  like  a  graven  statute ! '  Then  he 
took  'em  and  walked  away  towards  the  hen 
house,  where  Gen'ral  Jackson  was  a-roost- 
ing  all  alone  in  state,  he  being  the  only  fowl 
the  old  man  had  ever  took  the  trouble  to 
keep. 

"When  he  come  back  to  the  house  he 
was  more  calm.  'The  deed  is  done,'  says 
he.  *  I  would  it  had  been  that  doggoned 
preacher's  neck  instead.'  He  was  so  worked 
up  that  he  kind  of  talked  poetry.  '  How 
old  was  he,  Josh?'  asks  his  wife,  beginning 
to  roll  up  her  sleeves.  '  He  was  nine/ 
answers  the  old  man, '  and  never  was  licked 
in  a  fair  fight.'  '  I  think  I'd  better  put  him 
on  tonight,'  says  the  old  lady;  'that  there 
preacher's  jaws  don't  look  to  me  overly 
pow'ful/ 

"  By  and  by  she  come  back  in  where 
the  old  man  was,  looking  sort  of  bewildered 
like.  'Wot  is  it? 'asks  he.  '  The  j'ints,' says 
she.  '  I  reckoned  to  make  a  pot-pie  of  him, 
but  them  j'ints  are  like  trunk  hinges.'  '  He 

59 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

was  never  licked  in  a  fair  fight  for  nine 
years/  says  the  old  man,  sort  of  half  to  his- 
self.  '  Cook  him  whole,  like  a  turkey, 
stuffed/  he  goes  on.  '  He  can  lay  on  his 
back,  with  his  legs  up  —  though  he  never 
done  it  afore/  and  the  old  gent  groaned. 
'Yes,  I  might  do  that/  says  the  old  lady; 
'  only  you  know  our  ceiling  is  low.  Them 
legs  won't  bend.'  By  and  by  the  old  man 
looks  into  the  kitchen,  and  sees  the  Gen- 
Yal's  legs  sticking  up  out  of  a  pot,  like 
young  trees  just  set  out.  *  I  thought  you 
was  a-going  to  bake  him,  Mariar?'  says  the 
old  man.  '  So  I  am/  answers  she;  '  but  I'm 
a-going  to  bile  him  three  or  four  hours  fust. 
You  go  on  to  bed.' 

"  When  the  old  man  got  up  in  the  morn 
ing  he  found  his  wife  still  in  the  kitchen 
feeding  the  fire,  the  Gen'ral's  legs  sticking 
out  of  a  crack  above  the  oven  door.  '  I 
broiled  him  a  spell  after  b'iling  him/  says 
she.  '  I  reckon  he's  beginning  to  get  tender 
in  spots.'  When  it  was  time  to  go  to  church 
the  old  lady  went,  but  old  Patchley  stayed  at 
home  to  mind  the  fire.  It  was  a  sad  hour 
for  the  old  gent,  setting  there  in  the  shadder 
of  them  legs.  But  he  chirped  up  when  his 
60 


THE    PASSING   OF    GEN  L   JACKSON 

wife  got  back,  and  when  the  minister  come 
he  was  as  chipper  as  ever.  'Welcome  to 
our  humble  roof,  elder,'  says  he.  *  You  are 
just  in  time.  Mrs.  Patchley  is  even  now 
bringing  in  the  dinner.  Be  seated,  elder,' 
and  the  old  man  showed  the  preacher  to 
his  place  with  a  great  flourish  and  sot  down 
hisself  at  the  head  of  the  table.  Then  he 
turns  a  little  and  calls  out  in  a  sort  of  melt 
ing  voice :  '  Mariar,  dear,  fetch  in  the  pul 
let!'  And  she  comes  in  with  the  Gen'ral 
on  a  platter,  his  legs  a-waving  and  his  spurs 
a-rattling  together  like  a  man  playing  the 
bones. 

"  The  old  lady  put  down  the  Gen'ral  and 
then  set  down  herself,  and  when  his  legs 
became  quiet  the  minister  asked  a  blessing. 
The  old  man  pretended  not  to  notice  that 
the  preacher's  voice  trembled,  and  begun 
talking  with  his  regular  flourish.  '  We 
hope,  elder,  that  yer  fond  of  poultry  meat,' 
says  he.  'Y-a-e-s,'  answers  the  minister, 
kind  of  doubtful  like.  '  Mrs.  Patchley  and 
me  set  great  store  by  it,'  goes  on  the  old 
gent,  running  his  thumb  along  the  edge  of 
the  butcher  knife.  '  Brother  Patchley,  may 
I  ask  the  breed  of  the — the  pullet? '  says  the 
61 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

preacher.  '  She  was  a  Mayflower/  says  the 
old  man,  reaching  up  and  taking  holt  of  a 
spur  as  he  begun  to  saw.  '  I  reckoned  she 
might  a-been  a  Leghorn,'  says  the  preacher. 
'  Ha,  ha,  ha/  says  the  old  man;  '  good  joke. 
It  is  the  way  my  wife  has  of  cooking 
chicken  —  with  their  limbs  on  'em. 
"  Chicken  day  Mrs.  Patchley  "  our  friends 
call  it/  and  all  the  time  he  was  grinding 
away  at  the  leg  with  one  hand  like  a  man 
turning  a  corn  sheller,  and  sawing  with  the 
other.  'She  was  well  developed  for  a  —  a 
pullet/  says  the  preacher.  'Yes,  it's  the 
breed/  says  the  old  gent.  'They  are  tall 
and  rangey,  but  fine  eating,  remark 
ably  fine  eating/  and  he  was  now  stand 
ing  up  and  grinding  and  sawing  and 
pulling  and  yanking  like  a  man  rastling 
with  a  tame  bear.  'Juicy  and  fine  eating, 
but  a  difficult  breed  to  raise  on  account  of 
their  tenderness.  This  here  one  was  a  reg- 
'lar  fambly  pet  —  had  a  name  —  Mollie/ 
and  the  old  man  put  his  knee  agin  the  table 
and  give  a  yank  like  a  wild  hoss.  The  j'int 
busted,  and  the  Gen'ral  slipped  and  flopped 
a  summerset  like  a  bull-frog  and  gaffed  the 
preacher  in  the  neck  with  the  other  spur. 
62 


THE    PASSING   OF    GEN  L    JACKSON 

It  was  too  much  for  the  old  man  and  he  for 
got  hisself.  '  Hurray/  he  yelled.  *  Fust 
blood  for  the  Gen'ral!  He's  dead,  and 
hain't  only  one  leg,  but  he  knows  his  busi 
ness  yet!  Nine  years  old,  and  never  was 
licked  in  a  fair  fight!  Five  to  one  on  Gen 
'ral  Jackson  agin  the  preacher! '  and  he 
begun  to  dance  'round  the  table  and  shout 
for  somebody  to  take  the  other  end  of  the 
bet.  But  the  preacher  didn't  cotton  to  it  a 
bit,  and  he  got  right  up  and  wiped  off  his 
neck  with  his  handkerchief,  and  says  he: 
'  You  low  wretch,  I  want  no  more  of  your 
hospertality ! '  and  he  took  his  hat  and 
walked  out,  leaving  the  old  man  ripping 
'round  like  a  Injun,  offering  odds  on  the 
Gen'ral.  But  after  a  spell  he  got  calmer, 
and  then  he  laid  the  whole  trouble  to  the 
old  lady,  saying  she  hadn't  cooked  the 
Gen'ral  properly." 


VII 
"THE  COLONEL" 

The  Colonel  was  by  nature  playful.  Per 
haps,  too,  there  was  in  him  a  streak  of  per- 
verseness,  if  not  of  actual  depravity.  In 
deed,  Aunt  Jane  asserted  boldly  that  he 
""took  to  meanness  naturally  enough  to  be 
a  man."  But  Aunt  Jane  was  prejudiced,  the 
Colonel  once  having  insisted  on  backing 
along  a  country  road  for  a  quarter  of  a  mile, 
pushing  the  carriage,  with  Aunt  Jane  in  it, 
behind  him. 

That  the  Colonel  was  a  horse  may  be  in 
ferred.  He  was,  in  fact,  an  "  equine  horse," 
as  asserted  by  a  travelling  book-agent,  un 
mindful  of  the  canon  'gainst  a  little  learn 
ing.  His  standing  in  the  family  may  also, 
perhaps,  be  guessed  from  his  title.  He  was 
senior  in  the  line,  ranking  all  the  other 
horses  —  equine  or  otherwise.  There  was 
a  Major,  and  a  Captain,  and  possibly  others; 
but  had  any  of  these  been  advanced  to  a 
64 


"THE  COLONEL" 

colonelcy,  it  is  positive  that  the  Colonel 
would  have  been  made  a  brigadier-general 
at  least.  His  intelligence  and  strategic  qual 
ities  certainly  entitled  him  to  his  rank.  The 
hand  of  man  was  unequal  to  the  production 
of  a  device  for  fastening  the  stable  door 
which  he  could  not  readily  open,  to  let  him 
self  either  out  or  in,  as  desired.  He  slipped 
off  his  halter  as  one  slips  off  an  old  glove. 
Any  deficit  in  his  nightly  ration  of  oats 
meant  that  he  would  be  found  the  next 
morning  with  his  head  in  the  oat-bin, 
munching  in  a  resigned  manner,  as  much 
as  to  say,  "This  is  hard  work,  but  I  sup 
pose  I  must  do  it."  On  one  occasion,  hay 
not  being  forthcoming  in  his  manger,  he 
mounted  the  stairs  to  the  loft,  and  in  the 
morning  stood  with  his  feet  on  the  low  sill 
of  the  window  of  the  mow,  his  head  poked 
out  into  the  upper  regions  as  he  inspected 
the  landscape  and  cast  an  occasional  glance 
at  the  heavens.  For  the  Colonel  a  new 
driver  was  what  the  old  school  reading- 
books  called  "  rare  sport."  He  would  look 
back  over  his  shoulder  as  the  guileless  one 
mounted  to  the  seat,  and  almost  betray  him 
self  with  a  broad  grin.  Inside  a  half-mile  he 
5  65 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

would  develop  a  case  of  lameness,  which 
three  times  out  of  four  would  head  him  for 
the  nearest  stable.  And  on  the  fourth  occa 
sion  he  would  fetch  the  flinty-hearted  driver 
to  book  with  an  internal  pain  so  violent  that 
fierce  rolling  on  the  ground  could  alone 
bring  relief. 

But  in  all  of  these  matters  the  Colonel 
was  simply  humorous  and  playful.  Toward 
but  one  class  of  people  did  he  show  real 
animosity.  This  was  the  farm  hired  man. 
He  kicked  at  this  worthy  assistant  in  sea 
son  and  out  of  season.  Generally  speaking, 
his  kicks  landed.  It  was  seriously  sug 
gested  that  a  sort  of  a  bay  window  be  built 
just  to  the  rear  of  his  stall,  nicely  padded 
and  with  a  bottle  of  arnica  hanging  from  a 
string,  into  which  the  Colonel  could  project 
the  unsuspecting  agricultural  helper. 

Naturally  pasture  fences  were  the  Col 
onel's  derision.  He  jumped  over  them  if 
for  no  other  reason  than  to  show  that  he 
could  jump  back  again.  If  the  gate  was 
left  open,  he  would  neither  go  through  it 
nor  leap  the  fence,  seeming  satisfied  that  his 
liberties  were  assured;  but  if  the  gate  was 
closed  a  vault  over  the  fence  was  necessary 
66 


"THE  COLONEL" 

as  a  visible  declaration  of  independence. 
The  family  Boy  asserted  that  he  could  leap 
the  fence  backward.  No  proof  adduced. 
The  same  Boy,  his  imagination  made  fever 
ish  by  circus  posters,  said  that  he  actually 
saw  the  Colonel  lean  sidewise  against  a 
board  fence  and  flop  over  it  like  a  trap-door, 
or  the  leaf  of  a  book,  or  a  waffle-iron,  his 
feet  describing  the  arc  of  a  circle,  the  gyra 
tion  bringing  him  up  calmly  leaning  his 
other  side  against  the  opposite  side  of  the 
fence.  Boy  sharply  reprimanded  and  sent 
to  bed. 

Perhaps  the  Colonel's  most  notable 
achievement  was  with  Uncle  Asa,  a  ven 
erated  relative  from  Providence,  R.  I. 
Uncle  Asa  was  a  benign  personage,  and  all 
his  ways  were  ways  of  pleasantness.  He 
was  president  of  a  local  Universal  Peace 
Society  and  a  corresponding  member  of  the 
Philadelphia  Brother  of  Man  Association. 
He  was  also  interested  in  an  orphanage  and 
other  good  works,  and  was  a  charter  mem 
ber  of  the  Providence  Society  for  the 
Prevention  of  Cruelty  to  Animals.  His 
only  recreation  was  the  collection  of 
postage  stamps.  Though  his  collection 
67 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

was  not  esteemed  large  by  the  frater 
nity,  it  would  probably,  gummed  on  the 
face  of  nature,  have  covered  his  State,  with 
perhaps  a  narrow  fringe  for  neighboring 
commonwealths. 

It  has  already  been  hinted  that  the  new 
driver  was  always  the  victim  of  the  Colonel. 
It  should  further  be  explained  that  while 
being  driven  was  the  Colonel's  favorite  time 
for  exploiting  his  peculiar  humor.  If  in 
double  harness,  it  was  his  wont  occasionally 
to  kick  one  rear  leg  over  the  pole.  The  ex 
perienced  driver  paid  no  attention  to  this, 
and  after  a  time  he  would  return  his  leg  to 
its  rightful  place.  Again  he  would  throw 
his  other  leg  outside  the  trace,  retiring  it  in 
due  time.  On  rare  occasions,  while  going 
down  hill,  he  was  known  to  get  one  leg  over 
the  pole  and  the  other  over  the  trace;  but 
this  he  seemed  himself  to  think  was  rather 
overdoing  the  thing.  Once  in  a  while  to 
kick  up  both  hind  feet  without  losing  step 
with  the  others  was  another  pastime.  To 
none  of  these  things  did  the  experienced 
driver  pay  the  least  attention.  Driven  sin 
gle,  his  invention  was  equal  to  the  devising 
of  an  entirely  new  set  of  gymnastics. 
68 


It  was  Uncle  Asa's  first  meeting  with  the 
Colonel.  He  had  expressed  a  desire  to  take 
a  little  drive,  and  the  Colonel  seemed  to  be 
the  only  available  horse.  The  vehicle  pro 
vided  was  a  low  but  strong  single-seated 
phaeton.  The  Colonel  looked  over  his 
shoulder,  as  usual  suppressing  a  chuckle, 
and  then  they  started  off. 

Matters  went  on  pleasantly  enough  till 
they  reached  a  quiet  country  road  where 
there  were  no  houses  or  people  in  sight. 
Here  the  Colonel  put  a  leg  over  one  of  the 
shafts,  much  to  the  astonishment  of  Uncle 
Asa.  The  philanthropist  talked  to  the  mili 
tary  representative  and  attempted  to  stop 
him  and  alight,  but  he  seemed  to  prefer  to 
hobble  along.  By-and-by  he  took  his  leg 
back,  at  the  same  time  putting  his  other 
over  the  opposite  thill.  More  alarm  and 
remonstrance  on  the  part  of  the  stamp  col 
lector,  the  horse  continuing  to  hitch  him 
self  along.  Again  the  horse  got  all  his  legs 
inside  the  shafts,  but  immediately  began  to 
go  lame.  Nothing  tangible  resulting  from 
this  he  commenced  the  Aunt  Jane  plan  of 
backing.  Alarm,  deepening  to  consterna 
tion  on  the  part  of  Uncle  Asa.  He  tried 
69 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

all  manner  of  talk  but  to  no  avail.  He  ap 
pealed  to  the  Colonel's  sense  of  honor,  re 
minded  him  of  his  title,  called  upon  him  in 
the  names  of  the  great  "  equine  horses  "  of 
the  past ;  but  the  Colonel  continued  to  back. 
Suddenly  the  representative  from  Provi 
dence  became  possessed  of  the  notion  that 
the  horse  might  back  him  over  a  bank  or 
into  a  ditch.  In  a  fit  of  desperation  he 
seized  the  whip  and  gave  the  Colonel  a 
sharp  cut.  The  horse  instantly  kicked  up 
both  rear  feet.  He  was  still  backing  and 
miscalculated.  His  feet  came  down  beyond 
the  dash-board  and  inside  the  phaeton.  The 
patient  Uncle  Asa  went  out  backward, 
something  as  the  Boy  had  alleged  he  saw 
the  Colonel  flop  the  fence.  The  Colonel 
stopped  his  backing  and  tried  to  extricate 
his  feet.  He  could  not  do  so.  His  spinal 
column  was  at  an  exact  angle  of  forty-five 
degrees.  For  once  in  his  life  he  was  caught. 
He  ceased  to  struggle  and  stood  perfectly 
still.  But  he  felt  no  more  helpless  than  poor 
Uncle  Asa.  This  unfortunate  sat  down  on 
a  stump  and  surveyed  the  scene  before  him. 
The  Colonel  remained  with  his  nose  about 
six  inches  from  the  ground  and  his  tail  some 
70 


seven  feet.  It  occurred  to  Uncle  Asa  that 
he  resembled  somewhat  a  reversed  giraffe, 
and  he  wondered  how  he'd  look  on  a  post 
age  stamp.  Uncle  Asa  was  far  beyond  his 
wits'  end.  There  seemed  to  be  nothing  to 
do  but  wait  till  an  efficient  man  should  come 
along.  So  he  waited.  It  was  a  bad  day  for 
efficient  men.  At  the  end  of  an  hour  and  a 
quarter  no  man,  efficient  or  otherwise,  had 
appeared.  The  Colonel  seemed  to  be 
asleep.  Uncle  Asa  felt  that  his  patience 
was  gone.  Taking  a  note-book  from  his 
pocket,  he  tore  out  a  leaf  and  hastily  wrote 
riis  resignation  in  all  the  peace  and  humane 
societies  to  which  he  belonged.  Then  he 
rose  up  and  climbed  into  the  phaeton  from 
the  rear,  picked  up  the  reins,  and  seized 
the  whip  with  a  firm  grasp.  The  Colonel 
had  observed  the  resignation-writing  out 
of  the  tail  of  his  eye.  He  now  saw  the 
whip.  He  recognized  that  at  last  there  was 
but  one  thing  for  him  —  submission.  So 
he  walked  off  on  his  forward  feet,  his  rear 
ones  continuing  to  ride  in  state  with  Uncle 
Asa.  They  made  about  two  miles  an  hour, 
and  at  the  end  of  an  hour  and  thirty  min 
utes  came  down  the  main  road  and  turned 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

up  the  lane  to  the  house,  observed  of  all 
available  observers. 

In  good  time  the  Colonel  passed  away, 
full  of  years  if  not  absolutely  overflowing 
with  honors.  He  had  reached  the  age  of 
twenty-four.  He  died,  as  befitted  his  char 
acter,  beyond  the  confines  of  the  stable  and 
outside  the  pale  of  the  pasture  fence.  He 
had  done  what  he  had  never  done  before, 
broken  the  top  board  of  the  fence  in  setting 
forth  his  last  declaration  of  independence. 
Perhaps  it  also  broke  his  heart.  We  wrote 
the  intelligence  to  Uncle  Asa.  Instead  of 
sending  his  sympathy,  like  a  Christian,  he 
sent  his  congratulations. 


VIII 

PUBLIC  DEBATE 

"These  here  two  fellers,  old  Waldo  and 
Jarley  McCracken,  would  always  argue," 
said  Mr.  Milo  Bush  one  day  while  in 
Shanks's  grocery-store.  "  Argue  about 
anything.  Took  contrary  sides  on  every 
question.  Why,  if  old  Waldo  said  that  In 
juns  was  pizen,  Jarley  McCracken  would 
up  and  dispute  it,  just  as  if  the  whole  world 
don't  know  that  Injuns  arc  pizen,  and  ought 
to  be  exterminated  off  the  face  of  the  yearth. 

"  One  day  Jarley  McCracken  was  speak 
ing  of  whiskey,  and  happened  to  mention, 
keerless  like,  its  food  value,  and  what  did 
old  Waldo  do  but  up  and  dispute  it.  Said 
whiskey  as  a  beverage  to  supply  the  neces 
sary  liquid  for  the  proper  aswimulation  of 
the  solid  food  was  all  O  K,  but  he  denied 
its  value  as  a  food  per  sc  —  them  was  his 
furren  words,  just  like  that  —  per  se.  It 
was  the  general  view  that  if  he  couldn't 
make  out  his  case  without  dragging  in 
French,  that  he'd  better  keep  still. 

73 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"  Another  time  they  got  arguing  about 
great  men.  Old  Waldo  said  that  Napoleon 
was  a  greater  man  than  Dan'l  Webster.  Jar- 
ley  McCracken  of  course  said  it  was  no  such 
stuff.  Shanks  was  just  closing  up,  so  we  all 
went  over  to  the  schoolhouse  and  organ 
ized  a  regular  meeting,  and  let  'em  debate 
percisely  's  if  they'd  been  in  Congress,  with 
Doc  Ballister  for  the  referee,  just  like  the 
Senate. 

"Old  Waldo  led  off  on  the  Napoleon 
side.  Fust,  says  he,  let  us  make  a  inquiry 
into  what  constitoots  troo  greatness.  Is  it 
words,  or  is  it  acts?  Is  it  talk,  or  is  it  get- 
up-and-get?  The  igee  of  the  present 
speaker  is  that  it  is  acts.  Here  we  find  the 
difference  between  the  two  men  —  Napo 
leon  done  things,  but  the  alleged  fame  of 
Dan'l  Webster  rests  wholly  on  words.  Con 
sider  the  familiar  motto  of  Napoleon  [here 
Mr.  Bush  consulted  a  well-worn  note-book], 
'  Honey  soyt  qui  mall  why  pcnsc?  which,  for 
the  benefit  of  those  present  who  do  not 
understand  Greek,  if  any  there  be,  I  may 
translate,  *  If  you  are  going  to  do  a  thing, 
do  it.'  Of  course  Dan'l  Webster's  Diction 
ary  was  a  great  book.  Present  speaker  had 

74 


PUBLIC  DEBATE 

heard  it  said  that  it  weighs  ten  pounds.  But 
Napoleon  fired  cannon-balls  which  weighed 
a  hundred  pounds.  A  copy  of  Webster's 
Dictionary  would  scarcely  have  made  wad 
ding  for  one  of  Napoleon's  cannons. 
Napoleon  was  a  great  man,  take  him  as 
you  will.  See  how  he  spiked  the  enemy's 
fire-engines  before  he  applied  the  torch  to 
Moscow!  Even  in  defeat  Napoleon  Bunny- 
parte  was  great.  Beaten  back  by  over 
whelming  numbers  at  Waterloo,  did  he 
throw  up  the  sponge?  Hardly!  When  his 
charger  was  shot  from  under  him,  leaving 
him  in  the  air  hanging  to  the  limb  of  a  tree 
with  one  hand,  he  cried,  '  My  kingdom  for 
a  hoss  —  lay  on  McDuff!'  Napoleon  Bun- 
nyparte  faced  the  enemy  to  the  last.  When 
they  come  they  had  to  saw  off  the  limb  to 
get  him  down,  like  a  hornets'  nest.  That's 
what  Napoleon  was  —  a  hornets'  nest  on 
two  legs.  Then  old  Waldo  set  down,  and 
Jarley  McCracken  got  up. 

"  Fust,  he  said,  he  reckoned  that  if  Napo 
leon  had  been  what  he  is  cracked  up  to  be, 
that  he'd  a-had  an  extra  hoss  along  for  his 
a-de-kamp  to  lead  under  him.  However, 
it  was  not  necessary  to  belittle  Napoleon  in 

75 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

order  to  enlarge  Dan'l  Webster.  As  the 
great  Henry  Clay  had  said  of  Webster, 
'There  he  stands  —  look  at  him!'  The 
present  speaker  denied  that  Dan'l  Webster 
did  nothing  but  compile  the  great  diction 
ary  which  bears  his  name.  He  was  a  states 
man  as  well  as  a  leximographer.  Who 
stood  on  the  top  of  Bunker  Hill  Monument 
and  uttered  these  words,  '  Gentlemen,  give 
me  liberty  or  give  me  death  '?  And  if  they'd 
shot  the  monument  from  under  him,  he'd 
a-hung  to  a  star  —  a  star,  I  say,  and  still  put 
up  a  stiff  fight  for  blessed  liberty.  The  dic 
tionary  was  a  side  issue,  compiled  on  rainy 
clays  when  he  couldn't  work.  When  he 
thought  of  a  new  word  he  wrote  it  down 
on  his  cuff  or  somewhere,  and  when  he  got 
home  socked  it  into  his  dictionary.  So  it 
grew.  Did  Napoleon  do  any  such  thing? 
No!  Napoleon  simply  set  around  straddle 
of  a  hoss  about  four  sizes  too  big  for  him, 
and  had  his  picture  took.  He  was  better  at 
facing  the  muzzle  of  the  camera  than  he 
was  the  muzzle  of  the  cannon.  If  Daniel 
Webster's  legs  had  been  no  more  than 
eighteen  inches  long,  he'd  have  known 


76 


PUBLIC  DEBATE 

enough  to  have  kept  off  big  draught- 
hosses. 

"  Right  here  old  Waldo  couldn't  stand  it 
no  longer  to  hear  Napoleon  abused.  He 
hopped  up,  grabbed  the  big  school  globe, 
and  banged  Jarley  McCracken  with  it. 
His  head  crashed  through  the  South  Pacific 
Ocean,  and  his  nose  busted  out  in  the  north 
ern  part  of  England.  It  made  Jarley 
McCracken  pretty  mad,  and  he  bunted  old 
Waldo,  his  head  still  in  the  bowels  of  the 
yearth.  The  coast  of  Norway  caught  old 
Waldo  on  the  chin,  and  they  both  went 
down  in  a  heap.  The  yearth  all  busted  to 
flinders,  and  chunks  of  the  arctic  regions 
and  North  America  went  flying  through 
the  air.  Doc  Ballister  jumped  in  and  parted 
them,  and  we  went  home. 

"But  lemme  tell  you  they  wa'n't  the 
only  good  debaters  we  ever  had  here. 
There  was  Abe  Whydell.  He'd  argue  with 
you  'bout  anything,  and  he'd  do  it  with 
both  hands,  too.  That  was  Abe's  style  — 
bare  knuckles.  Marquis  of  Queensburrow 
rules  or  none  a-tall,  just  as  you  preferred. 
I  will  say  this,  that  Abe  Whydell  was  the 


77 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

fightin'est    man    that    ever    lived    in    these 
parts  —  that's  what  he  was." 

"Wasn't  afraid  of  anything,  eh?"  sug 
gested  somebody. 

"Afraid?  Abe  Whydell  afraid?  Now 
look  here;  do  you  want  to  know  about  Abe 
Whydell?  Do  you  want  to  have  his  char 
acter  made  clear  to  you?  Do  you  want  to 
feel  that  you've  knowed  him  yourself,  and 
'sociated  with  him,  and  had  business  rela 
tions  with  him,  and  lived  with  him,  and  felt 
towards  'him  like  a  brother?  " 

"  I  —  I  think  so." 

"  Then  see  here :  Abe  Whydell  would 
fight  a  rattlesnake  and  give  the  snake  the 
first  bite.  He  fit  because  he  loved  it.  His 
heart  was  in  it.  He  throwed  -his  whole  soul 
into  it.  Says  a  Boston  man  that  seen  him 
clean  out  a  sheriff's  posse  that  had  been 
posseing  after  him  two  days  —  says  the 
Boston  chap  to  me,  'That  feller  ain't  no 
billytantee;  he's  a  perfessional  —  that's  what 
he  is.'  Which  is  what  I  say,  too. 

"  Not  that  Abe  Whydell  was  a  quarrel 
some  man  —  fur  from  it.     I  think  I  may  say 
deliber'tly,  hefting  each  word  as  I  use  it,  that 
Abe  Whydell  was  the  peaceablest  man  I 
78 


PUBLIC  DEBATE 

ever  knowed.  That's  what  he  fit  fer  — 
peace.  Where  there  was  trouble,  there  you 
would  find  Abe  Whydell  putting  up  his 
dukes  for  peace.  That  was  his  watchword 
—  peace.  Many's  the  time  I've  saw  him, 
when  there  was  a  fight,  snatch  up  a  wooden- 
bottomed  chair,  and  as  he  waded  in  yell 
out,  '  Gentlemen,  wot  I  want  is  peace,  and 
durned  little  of  that!' 

"  Well,  things  run  on,  and  finally  Abe 
Whydell  had  licked  everybody  in  town. 
Natur'ly  this  had  a  bad  effect  on  him.  He 
begun  to  get  proud  and  stuck  up.  This 
wa'n't  to  be  wondered  at  —  it's  reg'lar 
human  nat're,  and  Abe  did  have  human 
nat're  about  him.  He  was  head  and  shoul 
ders  and  some  back  above  his  feller-men, 
but  he  were  human,  after  all.  So  he  begun 
to  get  haughty  and  overbearing,  and  when 
you  asked  him  to  have  a  drink,  mebby  he'd 
do  it,  and  mebby  he'd  say  he  wasn't  thirsty. 
Think  of  it,  wasn't  thirsty  —  couldn't  make 
up  a  reasonable  excuse  and  let  the  man  down 
easy,  but  must  rip  out  the  most  insulting 
and  impossible  thing  he  could  —  wasn't 
thirsty  —  just  as  if  a  man  says  to  you,  '  How 
balmy  the  air  is  this  morning,'  and  you 

79 


MR.  M1LO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

should  snap  back  at  him,  '  I  don't  know;  I 
ain't  breathing  this  morning.' 

"  Well,  as  I  said,  Abe  kept  wearing  his 
nose  higher  and  higher,  just  like  Napoleon 
Bunnyparte,  and  we  seen  that  fer  his  own 
good  he'd  got  to  be  took  down.  We  held 
a  public  meeting  and  talked  it  over,  and  the 
best  we  could  see  was  to  send  right  to  New 
York  and  get  an  Ai  prize-fighter  to  come 
on  and  whale  the  conceit  out  of  him.  I  was 
the  committee  ap'pinted  to  graft  the  letter. 
It  went  like  this: 

"'Post-master,  New  York: 

"'DEAR  COLONEL, —  We've  got  a  bad 
man  in  this  town.  For  a  private  citizen  we 
jedge  him  the  worst  man  that  ever  looked 
through  a  shirt  collar.  He  has  walloped 
us  all.  He  finished  the  last  man  two  weeks 
ago,  and  has  begun  to  go  round  again. 
Now  what  we  want  is  the  best  fighter  in 
your  town  to  come  out  here  and  pound  this 
man.  We  want  a  thorough  job  done,  and 
are  willing  to  pay  the  market  price.  We've 
got  the  money,  because  the  City  Free 
Library  Association  has  disbanded,  after 
voting  to  use  the  funds  on  hand  fer  this 
80 


PUBLIC  DEBATE 

purpose.     We  would  prefer  a   man  from 
around  Five  Points  somewheres,  as  we  hear 
that  they  are  intelligent,  reliable   citizens, 
and  understand  the  upper  cut.     Don't  send 
no  man  that  has  ever  been  convicted  of  any 
crime,    nor    a    furriner.     We    believe    in 
America  fer  the  Americans.     No  Irish  need 
apply.     The  Chinese  must  go. 
" '  Yours  truly, 
" '  SECRETARY  CHAMBER  OF  COMMERCE.' 

"That's  just  the  letter  we  sent,  except 
that,  after  it  had  been  read  and  approved  of, 
I  slipped  in  one  of  these  here  little  gable- 
end  marks  after  '  walloped  us  all/  and  wrote 
up  above  the  line,  '  except  the  Honorable 
Milo  Bush,  Esq.' 

"  It  was  some  time  before  we  heard  any 
thing,  then  we  got  a  letter  from  a  man 
signing  himself  Maguire,  saying  as  how  the 
post-master  was  so  busy  with  official  dooties 
that  the  matter  had  been  turned  over  to 
him.  He  said  he  had  a  good  man,  cham 
pion  heavy-weight  of  the  Sixth  Ward,  that 
would  come  out  and  do  the  job  fer  $300 
and  expenses.  We  held  another  meeting  to 
get  the  best  sense  of  the  community,  and 
decided  to  have  him  come  on. 
6  81 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"The  stage  he  arrove  on  got  in  at  nine 
o'clock  in  the  evening.  We  looked  him 
over,  and  found  him  about  Abe's  size  and 
general  build.  We'd  been  hoping  he  would 
be  bigger.  Some  said  he  couldn't  do  it,  and 
that  Abe  would  just  do  him  up  as  he  had  the 
rest  of  us.  But  the  man  said  we  could  de 
pend  on  his  science,  and  we  hoped  we 
could.  We  decided  to  app'int  a  committee 
to  wait  on  Abe  and  lay  the  matter  before 
him.  Nobody  seemed  anxious  to  serve  on 
this,  so  we  writ  a  letter  and  sent  it  by  a 
stranger  who  happened  to  be  in  town,  tell 
ing  him  it  was  a  propersition  to  tender  Abe 
a  reception  and  give  him  a  gold-headed 
cane.  This  stranger  wa'n't  in  no  fit  shape 
to  make  an  intelligent  report  when  he  got 
back,  but  after  the  doctor  finished  working 
over  him,  as  near  as  we  could  make  out, 
Abe  accepted  the  challenge.  You  see,  he 
had  got  out  of  bed  and  fell  on  the  stranger 
'cause  he  was  proposing  to  stir  up  strife  with 
his  letter.  Always  fer  peace,  Abe  was. 

"The  next  morning  at  sunup  we  staked 

out  a  ring  back  of  the  Methodist  church. 

The  man  sot  down  on  a  box  at  one  side, 

wrapped  in  a  hoss-blanket,  and  soon  Abe 

82 


PUBLIC  DEBATE 

come  along.  The  seconds  was  arranged 
fer,  and  Abe  took  off  his  coat,  and  the  two 
of  'em  stepped  into  the  ring.  The  next 
minute  we  was  the  sickest  crowd  in  the 
Territory.  There  never  was  no  fight  in 
that  ring,"  and  Mr.  Bush  paused  sadly. 

"Why?" 

"It  was  this  way:  They  stepped  into 
the  ring,  just  like  this.  Then  they  looked 
at  each  other,  like  this.  Then  says  the  man, 
'Heavings,  is  it  possible  that's  Abe!'  'It 
are,  Jim,  it  are!'  says  Abe.  Then  they 
rushes  up  and  throws  their  arms  round  each 
other,  like  this,  and  burrows  their  heads 
down  in  each  other's  necks,  and  just  reg'- 
larly  bust  out  crying.  Long  lost  brothers, 
you  see.  Twin  brothers,  too.  Hadn't  seen 
each  other  fer  fifteen  years.  And  there  they 
stood  and  cried,  and  moaned,  and  sobbed, 
and  took  on,  with  the  tears  a-running  down 
on  the  ground  and  making  it  so  slippery 
that  they  couldn't  a-fit  if  they'd  wanted  to, 
not  without  spikes  in  their  shoes.  Then 
the  rest  of  us  caught  it,  seeing  them  two 
strong  men  standing  there  braced,  weeping 
and  wailing  and  blubbering  'bout  the  old 
home,  and  their  sainted  mother,  and  their 

83 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

angel  sister,  and  their  brother  that  was 
hung-,  and  all  such;  and  you  may  snatch 
me  baldheaded  if  there  was  a  dry  eye  at  the 
ring-side.  And  as  we  stood  there  wring 
ing  each  other's  hands  and  boohooing,  and 
trying  to  find  somebody  in  the  crowd  that 
had  a  handkerchief,  suddenly  them  two  men 
stopped,  and  sort  of  mopped  off  their  tears, 
and  turned  round,  and  says  Abe,  '  Jim,  let's 
wade  in  together  and  lick  the  crowd  — 
every  one  of  'em  —  not  leave  no  sound  man 
a-tali:  '  All  right,  Abe,'  says  Jim.  And  I 
never  seen  such  a  scattering.  Every  last  man 
there,  except  me,  run  like  a  cat  in  a  dog- 
show;  and  them  two  fellers  didn't  catch  me; 
I  run  as  fast  as  was  really  necessary." 


IX 
BUDSTART'S  PECULIAR  ELECTION 

"Speaking  of  election,"  said  the  Judge 
(the  divine  had  been  holding  forth  for  five 
minutes  on  the  subject  of  predestination) 
— "  speaking  of  election  reminds  me  of  a 
case  of  it  which  I  saw  out  in  Dakota  a  dozen 
years  ago.  It  was  at  the  November  elec 
tion,  and  — "  He  stopped  as  the  astonished 
gaze  of  the  clergyman  rested  upon  him. 

"Judge,"  said  the  Doctor,  slowly,  "if  I 
ever  saw  a  story  dragged  in  by  the  ears, 
then  that  is  what  you  are  now  doing." 

The  Judge  laughed  good-humoredly,  but 
whether  he  was  amused  or  did  it  to  gain 
courage  it  was  impossible  to  say. 

"  Well,  Doctor,  I  think  it  is  better  to  drag 
in  a  story  by  the  ears  than  to  pop  up 
through  the  floor  with  one,  like  the  clown 
in  the  Christmas  pantomime.  I  hold  that 
the  transition  from  the  subject  of  foreordi- 
nation  to  a  Territorial  election  reminiscence, 
though  violent,  is  legitimate,  and  I  shall  go 

85 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

on,  even  at  the  risk  of  precipitating  a  re 
count  on  my  own  future  election. 

"  It  was  about  1883  that  a  callow  young 
man  named  Budstart  went  out  to  Running 
Horse,  Dakota,  and  started  a  newspaper. 
His  fitness  for  the  post  of  editor  was  not 
particularly  apparent;  but  in  those  days 
many  things  in  the  Territory  were  not  par 
ticularly  apparent,  and  of  no  class  of  phe 
nomena  was  this  more  often  the  case  than 
that  of  the  position  in  which  men  were 
found.  Budstart  called  his  paper  the  Run 
ning  Horse  Palladium. 

"  The  motto  of  the  Palladium  was,  '  Hew 
to  the  Line,  let  the  Chips  fall  where  they 
may/  though  the  only  hewing  Budstart  did 
for  a  long  time  was  to  edit  nonpareil  final- 
proof  notices  and  write  the  local  news.  The 
chips  seemed  to  hit  nobody,  and,  for  all  the 
public  knew,  he  may  have  hewn  consider 
ably  beyond  the  line.  But  in  course  of  time 
there  came  the  inevitable  county-seat  fight, 
and  then  Budstart  seized  the  axe  in  both 
hands,  and  turned  the  Palladium  into  a  very 
chip  volcano.  This  he  accomplished  by 
systematically  and  vigorously  abusing  and 
vilifying  every  man  in  the  rival  town  of 
86 


BUDSTART  S    PECULIAR    ELECTION 

Diana,  and  especially  the  editor  of  the 
Diana  Prairie  Blast,  a  portly  personage 
much  given  to  writing  obituaries  which 
ended  with  a  cloud-burst  of  mortuary  grief. 
Budstart  called  him  the  Weeping-Willow. 

"  I'm  sure  the  editor  of  the  Prairie  Blast 
would  have  been  delighted  to  write  the  obit 
uary  of  Budstart,  but  Budstart  refused  to 
die.  The  campaign  was  a  particularly  hot 
one.  The  candidates  were  largely  lost  sight 
of  in  the  struggle  over  the  county  capital. 
This  important  adjunct  of  a  free  people  was 
situated  out  on  the  prairie,  at  the  site  of  a 
deserted  village  popularly  called  Ghost 
Town.  The  court-house  was  a  small  square 
structure  which,  tradition  said  (and  tradi 
tion,  you  know,  was  young),  had  originally 
been  a  chicken-coop.  The  election  would 
take  this  building,  together  with  the  name 
and  fame  of  county  capital,  to  either  Diana 
or  Running  Horse,  whichever  got  the  ma 
jority  of  the  votes  cast. 

"  In  those  days  in  the  Territories  party 
lines  were  obliterated  by  sectional  lines, 
especially  when  a  county-seat  struggle  was 
on  hand,  as  was  generally  the  case.  It  was 
certain  that  Running  Horse  would  hold  a 

87 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

convention  and  nominate  a  ticket  composed 
exclusively  of  Running  Horses,  so  to  say, 
or  sympathizers  with  Running  Horse,  and 
that  Diana  would  hold  another  convention 
and  put  forward  a  ticket  of  Dianaites,  or 
partisans  of  Diana.  Six  weeks  before  the 
day  of  election  Running  Horse  carried  out 
her  part  of  the  programme,  and  presented 
what  the  Palladium  called  a  'thoroughly 
good  ticket,  strictly  unpartisan,  and  com 
posed  of  high-minded  and  honorable  busi 
ness  men  having  the  best  interests  of  Sitting 
Bull  County  at  heart,'  which  was  made  up 
wholly  of  men  living  either  in  Running 
Horse  or  within  a  few  miles  of  that  place. 
Among  the  latter  was  one  '  Doc '  Hadley, 
who  was  proposed  for  the  office  of  coroner, 
to  succeed  himself. 

"  Doc  Hadley  had,  in  fact,  held  the  office 
since  the  organization  of  the  county,  and  it 
was  looked  upon  as  belonging  to  him  for 
life.  Certainly  there  wasn't  another  man  in 
the  county  who  could  have  been  induced 
to  take  the  office,  for  the  melancholy  fact 
was  that  in  the  whole  four  years  the  Doctor 
had  never  had  a  case,  and,  a  coroner  being 
paid  exclusively  by  fees,  you  can  easily  esti- 
88 


BUDSTART  S    PECULIAR    ELECTION 

mate  the  value  of  the  office.  It  was  a  peace 
able  county,  and  violent  deaths  were  un 
known.  Occasional  misunderstandings  oc 
curred,  and  once  in  a  while  the  cheering 
bang  of  one  gentleman  shooting  at  another 
gentleman  would  reach  the  coroner's  ears 
and  bring  momentary  encouragement;  but 
the  gentleman's  aim  always  proved  to  be 
poor,  and  so  nothing  ever  came  of  it. 
Month  after  month  people  would  insist  on 
dying  in  a  perfectly  regular  way,  with  the 
aid  of  a  physician  and  surrounded  by 
friends,  and  so  the  office  of  coroner  re 
mained  utterly  barren. 

"  Of  course  I  can't  deny  that  sinister  and 
sarcastic  folks  used  to  insist  that  the  death 
of  every  man  or  woman  treated  by  Doc 
Hadley  in  his  professional  capacity  ought 
to  have  been  investigated  by  him  in  his  offi 
cial  person.  From  which  you  may  gather 
that  the  Doctor  did  not  have  the  confidence 
of  the  people.  He  lived  five  or  six  miles 
out  of  town,  on  a  sheep-ranch  —  sheep- 
ranching,  in  fact,  being  his  main  business. 
He  wasn't  a  regularly  educated  physician, 
by  any  means,  having  got  his  entire  knowl 
edge  of  medicine  from  a  certain  aged  grand- 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

mother,  who  lived  to  one  hundred  and  one 
years,  thanks  to  the  curative,  strengthening, 
preserving,  and  prolonging  virtues  of  the 
black-cat-skin  poultice,  made  on  the  hide 
side,  cat  to  be  killed  in  the  dark  of  the 
moon.  Doc  clung  consistently  to  the  teach 
ings  of  his  ancient  ancestor.  Of  course  he 
used  boneset,  wormwood,  tansy,  and  one  or 
two  other  simples  to  a  certain  extent,  nor 
did  he  wholly  scorn  a  few  such  '  boughten ' 
sedatives  as  nux-vomica,  belladonna,  and 
aconite;  but  chiefly  he  stuck  to  the  black- 
cat-skin  poultice,  carefully  laid  on  the  side 
opposite  to  the  fur  of  an  animal  which  had 
been  slaughtered  in  the  auspicious  hour  of 
the  moon's  greatest  obscurity.  He  was  a 
grizzly  man  of  few  words,  and  when  in  town 
was  much  given  to  peering  up  alleys  and 
gazing  into  back  yards,  probably  looking 
for  likely  cats;  and  he  habitually  wore  a 
pair  of  leather  trousers,  which  many  con 
jectured  were  made  from  the  foundations 
of  past  poultices. 

"  Diana  did  not  hold  her  convention  till 

some    two    weeks    after   that    of    Running 

Horse,  and  in  this  interval  young  Budstart 

bent  his  whole  energies  to  abusing  the  peo- 

90 


BUDSTART'S  PECULIAR  ELECTION 

pie  of  the  former  place.  The  Weeping- 
Willow  replied  as  best  he  could  by  abusing 
the  people  of  Running  Horse,  but  he  didn't 
command  the  wealth  of  choice  invective 
possessed  by  Budstart.  If  one  was  a  weep 
ing-willow,  the  other  was  a  bramble-bush. 
But  nothing  happened  to  change  the  office 
of  coroner  from  a  laughing-stock,  and  it 
would  have  been  a  direct  insult  to  offer  it 
to  any  other  man  in  the  county. 

"  This,  of  course,  was  the  precise  reason 
why,  when  they  held  their  convention,  the 
men  of  Diana  offered  it  to  Budstart,  or, 
rather,  why  they  simply  put  his  name  on 
their  ticket  without  consulting  him  about 
it  at  all.  The  convention  even  passed  a 
long  and  exceedingly  solemn  resolution  on 
the  subject  of  the  coronership,  asserting  that 
Doc  Hadley  was  worn  out  by  attending  to 
its  arduous  duties,  that  new  blood  was 
needed  in  the  office,  and  that,  throwing  all 
sectional  prejudice  to  the  four  winds,  they 
called  upon  the  intelligent  voters  of  Sitting 
Bull  to  support  for  coroner  the  one  man  to 
whom  the  unerring  finger  of  fate  pointed, 
namely,  Rufus  Henry  Budstart,  of  Running 
Horse.  The  Prairie  Blast  devoted  a  col- 

91 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTPIER  WORTHIES 

limn  to  the  choice,  predicting  a  brilliant 
future  for  the  office  in  the  hands  of  its 
esteemed  and  intelligent  contemporary,  end 
ing  by  advising  him  to  get  a  pair  of  cat- 
skin  trousers  and  take  the  stump  in  person. 
"The  consternation  of  Budstart  was  ex 
treme.  But  lie  knew  that  it  would  be  use 
less  to  protest,  so  he  settled  down  to  endure 
as  best  he  could  the  glee  of  the  Weeping- 
Willow  and  the  calls  of  his  friends  to  con 
gratulate  him  solemnly  on  his  prospects. 
But  it  took  half  the  snap  out  of  his  abuse 
of  Diana.  The  most  serious  feature,  how 
ever,  was  when  Doc  Hadley  heard  of  how 
matters  stood,  and  hurried  to  town.  The 
Doctor  was  in  a  very  earnest  frame  of  mind, 
and  taking  his  professional  eye  from  the 
productive  back  yard  and  the  teeming  alley, 
he  freely  charged  that  however  much  Bud- 
start  might  protest  that  he  did  not  want 
the  nomination,  he  had,  in  point  of  fact, 
worked  for  it  tooth  and  nail.  Further,  the 
indignant  Doctor  charged  that  Budstart  had 
been  bought  off  in  this  way  by  Diana,  and 
pointed  to  the  lessening  viciousness  of  his 
abuse  in  confirmation  of  this  view.  Then 
he  stood  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  street, 
92 


BUDSTART'S  PECULIAR  ELECTION 

shook  his  fist  at  the  Palladium  office,  and 
shouted :  '  He's  a  traitor,  and  he's  trying  to 
take  the  bread  out  of  the  mouth  of  the 
faithfulest  coroner  any  county  ever  had. 
I'd  like  to  get  a  cat-skin  poultice  onto  him 
once;  I'd  fix  him! ' 

"  As  election  drew  near,  the  coroner  can 
didates  were  gradually  lost  sight  of  in  the 
struggle  for  the  county-seat,  and  when  the 
day  actually  came  Budstart's  friends  at 
Running  Horse,  casting  the  straight  ticket, 
all  voted  against  him,  while  his  enemies  at 
Diana,  to  a  man,  voted  for  him.  There  was 
a  polling-place  at  Running  Horse,  and  an 
other  at  Diana,  each,  of  course,  in  charge 
of  '  home  talent.'  It  was  feared  at  Run 
ning  Horse  that  Diana  might  muster  the 
most  voters,  so,  to  neutralize  this,  and  at 
the  same  time  forever  to  crush  the  unscru 
pulous  ring  which  was  known  to  exist  there, 
the  crafty  political  managers  at  Running 
Horse  resorted  to  political  stratagem.  In 
some  unknown  way  they  got  an  old  Louis 
ville  city  directory  for  1872,  and  they  freely 
voted  the  names  of  three  or  four  hundred 
of  the  best  citizens  of  that  place.  This 
swelled  the  votes  of  Running  Horse  to 

93 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

something  above  the  actual  population,  but 
it  was  considered  a  legitimate  device  to 
place  the  county-seat  where  it  belonged,  and 
to  rebuke  the  criminal  ring.  The  cry  all 
day  was,  '  Down  the  Diana  machine! ' 

"  It  was  a  hushed  and  solemn  hour  when 
the  citizens  of  Running  Horse  assembled 
that  evening  in  the  office  of  the  Palladium 
to  await  the  returns  from  Diana.  They  sat 
about  on  the  chairs,  boxes,  and  even  the 
floor;  leaned  against  the  wall,  type-cases, 
the  Washington  hand-press,  and  anything 
which  promised  to  support  a  weary  political 
worker  who  had  done  what  he  could  to  re 
buke  dishonesty  at  Diana.  About  nine 
o'clock  a  messenger  rode  up.  He  entered, 
and  announced  that  Diana  had  polled  about 
two  hundred  more  votes  than  Running 
Horse.  The  sturdy  reformers  were  too  dis 
gusted  even  to  swear.  They  simply  sat  or 
leaned  where  they  were  and  thought.  At 
last  the  silence  was  broken  by  Budstart, 
who  jumped  up  and  exclaimed,  '  Great 
heavens!  then  I'm  elected  coroner!' 

"'Yes,'  said  the  messenger;  'you  went 
through  at  Diana  even  with  your  ticket. 
We've  lost  the  county-seat,  but  we've  got 

94 


BUDSTART  S    PECULIAR    ELECTION 

the  coronership.'  This  helped  to  restore 
good-nature,  and  three  cheers  were  given 
for  Coroner  Budstart,  while  Doc  Hadley 
slunk  away." 

"Is  that  all?"  asked  the  Doctor. 

"  Well,"  answered  the  Judge,  "  as  a  mat 
ter  of  record  I  may  add  that  Budstart  re 
fused  the  office,  to  the  great  apparent  grief 
of  the  Weeping-Willow,  and  the  county 
commissioners  appointed  the  worthy  Had 
ley,  which  was  more  soothing  to  his  per 
turbed  spirit  than  any  cat-skin  could  have 
been.  By-the-way,  Doctor,  you  are  a  mem 
ber  of  the  Reform  Club,  are  you  not?" 

"  I  am,"  replied  the  Doctor. 

"  Then  I  ought  also  to  add,  as  a  contri 
bution  to  your  stock  of  knowledge  about 
reform,  anti-machine  politics,  and  general 
purity  of  government,  that  it  came  out  a  few 
months  later  that  Diana  had  used  on  elec 
tion  day  an  old  Montreal  directory,  and 
Montreal  being  a  larger  place  than  Louis 
ville,  she  had  of  course  won." 


THE  LONG-SUFFERING  SCANDINAVIAN 

"Talk  about  turning  the  other  cheek 
when  a  man  welts  you  on  one,  as  I  read  of 
doing  in  a  newspaper  once,"  observed  Mr. 
Milo  Bush,  with  both  a  philosophical  and 
a  reminiscent  note  in  his  voice,  "  it  don't 
count  with  me  since  I  knowed  that  there 
Ole  Oleson.  That  there  Ole  Oleson  would 
not  only  turn  the  other  cheek,  but  he  would 
walk  around  and  get  it  in  just  the  posish 
you  needed  for  giving  him  another  all-fired 
old  smite;  and  mebby  if  you  was  short,  and 
he  being  uncommon  tall,  he  would  scrunch 
down  a  little  and  give  you  all  the  show  in 
the  world ;  and  then  ask  you  if  you  wouldn't 
like  to  begin  all  over  again,  or  if  he 
shouldn't  drop  around  every  morning  at 
eight  o'clock  and  let  you  take  your  whack 
reg'lar.  It  seemed  just  as  if  he  knowed 
that  the  town  was  hard  up  for  fun,  and  just 
made  up  his  mind  to  let  the  boys  have  all 
the  good,  square,  honest  sport  with  him 
96 


THE   LONG-SUFFERING   SCANDINAVIAN 

that  they  wanted  to.     And  then  in  the  end 
it  come  out  that  he  had  no  gratitude. 

"You  see,  this  yere  Ole  Oleson  struck 
town  in  May.  The  first  thing  he  done  was 
to  walk  into  Hi  Labbett's  grocery,  and  says 
he,  '  Meester,  aye  tank  aye  vants  to  geet  a 
yob7 — that's  the  way  he  talked,  the  poor 
miserable  furrener;  never  opened  his  jaws 
without  sp'iling  a  mouthful  of  good  Eng 
lish.  '  Jus'  set  yourself  on  the  counter  there 
—  a  man's  coming  in  here  in  'bout  a  nour 
looking  for  somebody  to  work  on  his 
ranch/  says  Labbett,  and  he  p'inted  to  a 
place  where  the  boys  had  a  little  sort  of 
a  needle-jabbing  dufunny  rigged  up.  It 
worked  with  a  string,  and  when  you  pulled 
the  string  the  man  that  sot  in  that  place  got 
jabbed.  Well,  Ole  sot  there,  and  the  boys 
come  in,  and  Joe  Millikan,  as  Mayor  of  the 
town,  yanked  the  string  first.  Did  Ole  get 
mad?  Not  much!  He  just  got  up  quick 
like,  and  says  he,  in  his  busted  English, 
'Aye  tanks  there  bees  a  yabber  there  that 
yabs  pretty  good,'  with  a  grin  that  showed 
more'n  ten  dozen  teeth.  Then  you  may 
shoot  me  with  a  Gattelling  gun  if  he  didn't 
set  back  down  in  the  same  place;  and  Pete 

l  97 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Barker,  being  a  alderman,  worked  the 
string,  follered  by  Jedge  Longsdorf,  and 
Cap'n  Sarcey,  and  miscerlaneous  cit'zens. 
And  he  a-setting  there  and  a-grinning,  and 
a-saying  once  in  a  while,  in  his  outlandish 
English,  'Aye  tank  you  fallers  bees  trying 
to  play  some  yokes  on  von  Swedeman.'  I 
never  seen  anything  like  it.  And  just  re 
member  that  he  was  over  six  feet  tall  and 
well-proportioned,  and  mebby  'bout  twenty- 
three  years  old.  But  there  he  sot,  murder 
ing  the  best  language  on  this  yere  green 
yearth. 

"  Well,  that  will  give  you  an  igee  of  what 
the  feller  was.  You  couldn't  get  him  mad 
noways  —  least  it  'peared  that  way.  The 
boys  used  to  put  him  on  the  buckin'est 
broncos  to  ride,  and  give  him  the  kickin'est 
guns  to  shoot,  and  tramp  him  round  dark 
corners  where  was  sot  the  snappin'est  b'ar- 
traps.  But  all  the  time  that  Norsk  was 
good-natured  as  a  p'inter  dog,  a-smiling  and 
a-trying  to  let  on  he  could  talk  our  lan 
guage,  though  he  oughter  a-seen  it  were 
too  many  for  him. 

"  Even  when  the  sport  got  a  little  rough 
he  stood  it  just  the  same.  One  day  Jedge 


THE  LONG-SUFFERING  SCANDINAVIAN 

Longsdorf  took  a  little  too  much  —  don't 
think  the  Jedge  was  a  hard  drinker,  'cause 
he  wa'n't;  he  was  a  very  mod'rate  drinker; 
never  took  anything  stronger  than  whiskey 
—  one  day  Jedge  Longsdorf  got  bailing, 
pitched  into  Ole,  and  pounded  away  at  him 
till  he  was  tired;  but  I'll  be  hanged  if  the 
feller  didn't  take  even  this  all  in  good  part. 
'  Aye  tank  the  Yudge  he  bees  feeling  pretty 
good  to-day,'  says  he  to  me,  telling  me  of 
it,  with  his  face  all  bunged  up.  '  Yust  see 
how  he  yumped  on  von  Swedeman.  Haw, 
haw,  haw ! '  I  were  too  disgusted  to  speak. 
The  Jedge  done  the  same  thing  dooring  the 
month  of  June  four  or  five  times. 

"  When  Fourth  of  July  come  we  decided 
to  give  up  the  usual  celebration,  and  jus' 
have  fun  with  Ole.  So  we  kep'  it  up  pretty 
hot  all  day,  putting  fire-crackers  in  his  pock 
ets,  and  shooting  holes  through  his  hat,  and 
all  such  jokes.  He  took  it  just  like  he  had 
everything  else  —  a-smiling  and  a-chewing 
away  at  our  bootiful  language.  The  Jedge 
went  slow  on  liquors,  as  usual,  being,  as  I 
said,  what  I  have  heered  called  an  absteam- 
erous  man,  and  it  were  along  in  the  after 
noon  before  he  got  reg'larly  b'iling;  but 
99 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

when  he  did,  he  took  a  few  passes  at  Ole, 
though  we  discouraged  it,  not  wanting  to 
help  along  nothing  that  was  in  bad  taste. 
The  day  closed  up  all  O  K,  and  we  planned 
to  send  Ole  up  on  the  flat  roof  of  Tom  Gris- 
wold's  supply  store,  and  have  some  evening 
fun  at  shooting  fireworks  at  him.  We  got 
him  up  some  way  —  I  disremember  how 
—  and  then  we  snaked  away  the  ladder  and 
popped  it  to  him.  It  looked  'sif  it  was 
going  to  be  the  best  joke  ever  played  in 
Bon  Pierre  County.  First  we  touched  him 
up  with  roarman  candles,  then  we  plugged 
him  with  rockets,  then  we  lit  pin-wheels  and 
throwed  'em  up,  and  let  him  rastle  with  'em 
jus'  as  he  seen  fit.  Young  man,  you've 
heern  tell  of  how  even  the  worm  will  turn 
over,  being,  as  I  take  it,  that  he  can  bite 
better  in  that  posish.  Well,  that's  what 
that  Norsk  done.  He  turned  over  on  us, 
and  showed  that  he  was  ungrateful  after  all 
we  had  done  to  learn  him  our  manners  and 
customs,  and  get  him  so  he  could  talk  Eng 
lish  right,  like  we  done  ourselves.  How'd 
he  go  at  it?  Slid  down  the  eaves-spout 
right  amongst  us,  where  we  stood  blazing 
away  at  him.  Then  the  mask  of  his  good- 

100 


THE  LONG-SUFFERING 

nature  dropped  off,  as  I  may  say,  and  we 
seen  what  a  rep-tile  we  had  been  harboring 
in  our  buzzums." 

Mr.  Bush  pushed  away  his  upper  lip  and 
showed  the  lack  of  two  important  teeth. 
"Did  Ole  hit  me?"  he  continued,  with 
warmth.  "  Did  he  hit  me?  Young  man, 
don't  you  see  Pm  alive?  Ain't  I  before  you 
in  the  flesh?  No,  sir;  it  was  Jedge  Longs- 
dorf  that  hit  me;  but  Ole  hit  the  Jedge.  It 
was  a  carom  shot,  too,  because  after  Ole 
played  on  the  Jedge,  the  Jedge  struck  agin 
Joe  Millikan  and  bounded  off  and  struck 
me.  It  busted  those  teeth  and  pocketed  me 
in  a  ditch.  I  was  out  of  the  rest  of  the 
game.  What  become  of  the  Jedge  and 
Joe?  Young  feller,  what  become  of  the 
man  that  went  out  to  shake  hands  with  the 
cyclone?  Where's  the  man  that  went  up, 
whistling  along,  with  his  hands  in  his  pock 
ets,  and  stuck  his  nose  into  the  muzzle  of 
the  active  volcano?  My  young  friend,  I 
jus'  laid  in  that  ditch  and  pertended  I  was 
dead,  so  he  wouldn't  pay  no  more  attention 
to  me.  It  wa'n't  hard  to  pertend.  The 
boys  closed  in  on  him,  and  he  jus'  straight 
ened  up  and  got  in  some  masse  shots  on 

101 


MR.  MlLOi  BtFSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

'em —  though  they  ought  to  have  been 
barred.  He  used  a  new  cue-ball  every  time, 
and  pocketed  at  least  one  man  in  the  ditch 
at  each  shot.  Then  for  a  change  he  begun 
to  play  that  his  arm  was  a  hammer,  and 
ev'ry  time  he  brought  a  fist  like  a  pile-driver 
down  on  a  man  it  drove  him  a  foot  into  the 
ground  —  or  it  would  if  the  man  had  been 
stiff  enough,  which  he  wasn't  often,  though 
gener'ly  he  was  soon  after.  In  five  minutes 
Ole  Oleson  was  the  only  man  in  the  street 
except  us  in  the  ditch,  all  letting  on  we  was 
dead,  and  most  of  us  wishing  we  was. 
Then  says  he,  in  his  sickening  broken  Eng 
lish,  says  he,  '  Aye  tank  von  Swedeman  he 
have  a  leetle  Fort-a-Yuly  heemself,'  and  he 
walked  away,  and  after  some  time  such  of 
us  as  could  make  the  riffle  crawled  out  of 
the  ditch.  Young  man,  my  hope,  and  I 
reckon  I  may  say  my  prayer,  ever  since  has 
been  that  I  may  never  again  have  any  truck 
with  an  ungrateful  man,  nor  one  that  can't 
talk  good  English/' 


XI 

THE  UNFORTUNATE  TOWN  OF  BLUEBLOSSOM. 

Of  all  the  peripatetic  laborers  in  the  typo 
graphical  field  that  I  ever  knew  —  and  my 
acquaintance  among  them  has  not  been 
small  —  certainly  the  most  entertaining  was 
Mr.  Mark  Wallis.  In  some  respects  he  re 
versed  all  established  facts  of  human  nature. 
In  his  normal  condition  —  that  is,  when 
under  the  moderate  influence  of  liquor  —  he 
was  reserved,  almost  taciturn,  and  worked 
steadily  at  his  case;  but  when  sober,  as 
would  happen  Friday  night  after  a  long 
stretch  at  "  making  up  "  and  printing  the 
paper,  he  would  relapse  into  a  vein  of  mel 
low  reminiscence  which  showed  his  en 
counters  with  people  and  things  to  have 
been  extensive,  not  to  say  extraordinary. 
One  night  he  said: 

"  The    most    unfortunate    town    I    ever 

worked  in  was  Blueblossom.      A   day  on 

which  it  didn't  have  a  fire  it  would  have  a 

cyclone,    and    all    the    neighboring    towns 

103 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

shipped  their  tramps  and  cats  there  regu 
larly.  A  car-load  of  these  commodities 
would  arrive  nearly  every  night  from  some 
point.  As  a  protection  against  fire  the  peo 
ple  bored  an  artesian  well.  The  well 
flooded  the  town  and  wrecked  twenty 
houses.  They  plugged  up  the  well,  and 
that  night  the  post-office  burned  down. 
Blueblossom  was  the  Niobe  of  towns. 

"  Still,  there  was  nothing  pliable  about 
Blueblossom's  upper  lip;  she  boomed  her 
self  like  other  new  Territorial  towns,  or 
tried  to  at  least,  though  with  Nemesis  run 
ning  close  behind  all  day,  and  camping  on 
her  trail  at  night,  Blueblossom  couldn't  do 
much.  Her  people  prided  themselves  on 
her  permanency  and  stability.  The  editor 
of  the  Blueblossom  Humming-Sir  d,  for 
whom  I  worked,  one  day  wrote  an  item 
saying  that  '  Blueblossom  is  not  a  mush 
room  town  put  up  on  wind,  but  a  substan 
tial  municipality,  showing,  especially  in  the 
buildings,  its  solidity  and  permanency.' 
He  stopped  and  said  to  me:  'Mr.  Wallis, 
go  and  drive  that  confounded  stray  hog  out 
from  under  the  house.  He's  scratching  his 
blamed  back  on  the  floor  joists  and  shaking 
104 


THE  UNFORTUNATE  TOWN  OF  BLUEBLOSSOM. 

the  building  so  I  can't  write/  Those  wan 
dering  hogs  got  under  the  Methodist 
church,  rooted  away  the  foundation,  and 
allowed  the  structure  to  topple  over,  and 
the  wind  rolled  it  away  like  a  tumbleweed. 
A  rival  town  stole  the  court-house. 
Cyclones  got  the  outskirts,  fire  the  business 
district,  and  the  well  the  residence  portion. 
The  day  I  started  away  but  one  building, 
a  small  real-estate  office,  remained.  When 
I  went  over  the  hill  I  looked  back,  and,  as 
I  live  to  tell  it,  a  stray  steer  stuck  his  head 
through  a  window  of  this,  got  his  horns 
caught,  and  ran  off  pell-mell  across  the 
prairie  with  it  on  his  head. 

"  But  what  I  started  to  tell  you  about  was 
Blueblossom's  Fourth-of-July  celebration. 
Of  course  it  was  doomed  to  failure,  like 
everything  else  there.  Even  their  Christ 
mas  trees  failed.  A  hornet's  nest  thawed 
out  of  the  first  one  and  the  people  left  with 
great  haste;  and  on  the  second  one  the 
labels  became  all  mixed  up,  and  Grandpa 
Sommers  got  a  pair  of  roller-skates  and  a 
rattlebox,  Baby  Brown  a  shot-gun,  and  so 
on ;  and  finally  the  whole  thing  broke  up  in 
a  row.  But  the  memories  of  the  Blueblos- 
105 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

som  failures  which  well  up  in  my  bosom  are 
so  numerous  that  I  become  garrulous. 

"  On  the  occasion  of  this  Independence- 
day  celebration  the  first  untoward  event  was 
the  explosion  of  the  cannon;  but  the 
Fourth-of-July  cannon  usually  does  ex 
plode,  so  this  need  not  cause  remark.  The 
most  important  thing  on  the  programme 
of  the  day  was  the  oration  by  the  Honorable 
Medary  Buzzell,  candidate  for  Territorial 
Delegate  in  Congress.  He  arrived  on  an 
early  train,  and  was  escorted  to  the  hotel. 
Three  citizens  soon  waited  on  him,  and  in 
formed  him  that  they  were  a  committee  sent 
by  the  General  Celebration  Committee  of 
Fifty  on  a  delicate  but  important  mission. 
'  We  hope/  said  the  leader,  '  that  you  will 
receive  us  in  the  spirit  in  which  we  come. 
We  have  a  weighty  matter  to  discuss  with 
you,  but  when  we  explain  the  situation  we 
are  sure  you  will  admit  that  we  are  fully 
justified.' 

' l  State  the  cause  whereby  I  am  thus  hon 
ored  with  your  presence,'  said  the  gentle 
man,  pompously. 

"'Well,'  said  the  man,  *  it  is  this  way: 
There  are  a  number  of  Englishmen  living 
106 


THE  UNFORTUNATE  TOWN  OF  BLUEBLOSSOM. 

near  here,  younger  sons,  poor  relations,  and 
similar  family  debris,  who  have  been  sent 
out  here  to  learn  how  to  farm  by  playing 
football  in  the  pasture  and  chasing  foxes 
on  the  wheat  land.  They  have  money,  and 
are  good  customers  of  the  town.  But  last 
year  the  orator,  as  is  usual  with  Fourth-of- 
July  speakers,  handled  the  British  lion 
pretty  roughly  —  in  fact,  he  fairly  twisted 
his  tail  —  and  it  made  these  Englishmen 
angry,  and  they  threaten,  if  the  thing  is  re 
peated  this  year,  that  they  will  go  to  a  rival 
town  to  do  their  business  —  buy  their 
cricket  bats,  hunting-saddles,  and  other 
agricultural  implements.  We  are  hoping 
that  you  haven't  anything  in  your  speech 
against  the  lion,  Mr.  Buzzell?' 

"  '  Gentlemen,'  said  Buzzell,  '  I  am  sorry 
to  disappoint  you,  but  there  is  a  great  deal 
in  my  speech  about  the  lion,  and  I  take  one 
or  two  stabs  at  the  unicorn.  As  for  twist 
ing  the  former's  tail,  I  twist  it  off,  and  then 
beat  the  despicable  creature  with  the  bushy 
end  of  it  till  he  lies  on  his  back  and  begs 
with  his  poor  dumb  paws  for  mercy.' 

" '  But  can't  you  cut  it  out? '  asked  the 
man. 

107 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"'Possibly;  I'll  try.  I  can  enlarge  on 
the  slavery  idea,  and  talk  about  Appomat- 
tox,  and — ' 

"  '  Hold  on,'  said  the  man;  '  that's  another 
point  that  we  were  delegated  to  speak  to 
you  about.  There  are  a  number  of  Mis- 
sourians  in  town,  and  a  few  Texans, 
brought  here  by  the  stock  interests,  all  good 
loyal  citizens,  and  leading  men  in  the  com 
munity  —  Major  Foster,  of  the  Confederate 
army,  is  our  county  attorney  —  but  of 
course  they  wouldn't  like  it  to  hear  the  lost 
cause  abused  —  genuinely  vilified  —  in 
your  remarks.' 

"  '  Well/  said  the  orator,  '  I  don't  see  how 
I  can  help  it  and  give  the  necessary  snap 
to  my  speech,  with  our  hereditary  Fourth- 
of-July  enemy,  the  British  lion,  barred. 
You  see,  that  wouldn't  leave  me  anything 
but  Mexico.' 

" '  That's  another  point  we  were  to  see 
you  about.  Not  a  word  against  Mexico. 
Colonel  Vallejo,  the  largest  stock-owner 
here,  is  a  Mexican.  He  owns  the  very 
grove  where  you  are  going  to  speak,  and 
he's  pretty  sensitive.  We  don't  think  you'd 
better  so  much  as  mention  Mexico.' 
108 


THE  UNFORTUNATE  TOWN  OF  BLUEBLOSSOM. 

" '  Will  you  please  tell  me  what  I  am 
going  to  talk  about,  and  make  an  acceptable 
Fourth-of-July  speech?' 

"  '  Can't  you  just  let  the  eagle  scream? ' 

" '  But,  my  dear  sir,  the  eagle  has  got  to 
scream  at  something  to  be  effective  on  the 
Fourth  of  July.  The  Fourth-of-July  eagle 
is  not  a  bird  which  screams  simply  to  hear 
himself  scream.  He  must  know  he  is  scar 
ing  somebody,  or  he  is  silent/ 

" '  That  occurred  to  us,'  admitted  the 
man,  '  before  we  came  in.  I  don't  know 
as  it  will  be  of  any  use  to  you,  but  an  idea 
struck  us,  which  you  can  use  if  you  like. 
There  are  the  Indians  —  abuse  them/ 

"  The  honorable  gentleman  was  becom 
ing  somewhat  warmed  up  by  this  time,  and 
he  said,  '  You  are  quite  sure  they  wouldn't 
be  offended,  and  buy  their  war-paint  and 
ghost-dancing  pumps  elsewhere?' 

'  *  Oh  yes,'  answered  the  man.  '  You'll 
pardon  us  for  speaking  as  we  have,  but  so 
many  things  have  happened  to  the  town 
that  we  didn't  feel  that  it  could  stand  much 
more.  Only  yesterday  our  high-school 
building  fell  down,  and  a  freight  train 
smashed  the  railroad  depot;  and  already  to- 
109 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

day  the  cannon  has  burst,  and  the  artesian 
well  broken  out  again  and  flooded  the  race 
track,  so  we  can't  have  any  of  the  trials  of 
speed  which  are  on  the  programme.  Abuse 
the  Indian  all  you  want  to;  and  if  you  would 
care  to  take  a  shy  at  the  Chinese  too,  just 
go  ahead.' 

"  Well,  the  upshot  of  it  was  that  the  Hon 
orable  Mr.  Buzzell  refused  to  deliver  any 
address  at  all;  but  of  course  it  didn't  make 
the  least  difference,  as  the  idea  that  they 
could  have  a  celebration  at  Blueblossom 
was  absurd  from  the  first.  An  attempt  was 
made  to  give  what  the  programme  called 
the  '  Sports  of  the  Populace,'  but  a  leading 
citizen  fell  and  broke  his  leg  in  the  foot 
race,  and  when  the  Committee  on  Greased 
Pig  carefully  lubricated  their  animal,  and 
turned  him  loose  to  become  the  property 
of  the  man  who  could  catch  him,  he  only 
grunted,  and  began  rooting  among  some 
gumweeds,  refusing  to  run  an  inch. 

"They  had  even  worse  luck  with  that 
other  standard  greased  preparation  of  the 
small-town  celebration.  The  chairman  of 
the  Committee  on  Glee  Club  and  Greased 
Pole  was  a  local  humorist  named  Verbeck. 
He  restrained  himself  while  helping  get  the 


no 


UNSPORTSMANLIKE    CONDUCT    OF    THE    GREASED    PIG 


THE  UNFORTUNATE  TOWN  OF  BLUEBLOSSOM. 

singers  together,  but  gave  his  exuberant 
fancy  full  range  on  the  pole.  Instead  of 
nailing  the  usual  pocket-book  containing 
$2  on  top,  and  greasing  the  pole  the  whole 
length,  he  covered  the  last  four  feet  with 
a  most  villanously  sticky  substance,  and 
the  Mayor,  who  succeeded  in  climbing  the 
pole,  stuck  at  the  top  all  the  afternoon,  in 
cluding  the  time  of  the  thunder-shower, 
which  of  course  came  up  and  ended  the 
dismal  proceedings." 

"Isn't  that  a  pretty  stiff  detail  —  the 
Mayor's  climbing  the  greased  pole  for 
$2?"  I  asked. 

"  The  truth  about  Blueblossom  is  always 
stiff.  He  didn't  climb  the  pole  for  the  $2, 
but  because  the  county  judge  '  dared '  him. 
The  Mayor  was  going  to  donate  the  money 
to  the  Episcopal  Church  Society,  but  while 
he  was  sticking  to  the  pole  the  lightning 
struck  the  church  steeple  and  burned  the 
building,  so  it  didn't  make  any  difference. 
I  don't  know  how  long  the  Mayor  staid 
up  there,  but  I  noticed  him  on  the  street  the 
next  day.  Poor  Blueblossom,  I  was  glad 
when  I  saw  the  last  building  tearing  away 
on  that  steer,  and  knew  the  place  was  out 
of  its  miserv  at  last." 


XII 

THE  JUDGE'S  BURGLAR 

Judge  Crabtrce,  having  that  day  suc 
ceeded  in  collecting  a  bill  against  a  man 
which  he  had  never  expected  to  get,  felt 
on  particularly  good  terms  with  himself  and 
the  world  in  general. 

"  I'm  strongly  inclined  to  think,"  he  re 
marked,  as  he  critically  observed  the 
gathering  ash  on  his  second  cigar,  <4  that  my 
worst  fault  has  from  the  first  been  that  of 
underrating  myself.  I  have  always  been  a 
much  abler  man  than  I  have  given  myself 
credit  for  being.  '  I'll  settle  that  matter 
next  week,'  he  said  to  me.  '  Come,'  I  an 
swered,  '  shell  out,  or  I'll  secure  a  writ  of 
envoy  extraordinary  and  •minister  plenipoten 
tiary  and  settle  you?  And,  as  I  expected, 
the  roll  of  those  words  just  completely  flab 
bergasted  him,  and  he  shelled  out  then  and 
there.  If  I  hadn't  been  so  modest  I  think 
I  should  have  got  on  better." 

"  Yes,"  observed   Major   Dodge,   "  mod- 

112 


THE   JUDGE  S   BURGLAR 

esty  is  your  besetting  sin.  There  is  not  the 
least  doubt  in  the  world  that  if  you  could 
always  deal  exclusively  with  men  like  this 
one,  who  don't  know  the  difference  between 
a  pug  puppy  and  an  ocean  greyhound,  that 
you  would  get  along  gloriously/' 

"  Did  I  ever  tell  you,"  went  on  the 
Judge,  not  deigning  to  notice  the  other's 
remark,  "  how  I  outwitted  the  burglar  when 
I  lived  at  Syracuse?" 

The  question  was  put  to  a  vote,  and  it 
was  decided  that  as  far  as  they  were  aware, 
he  never  had  told  how  he  outwitted  the 
Syracuse  burglar;  so  he  went  on: 

"  I  suppose  the  burglars  at  Syracuse  are 
among  the  brightest  in  the  profession.  I 
don't  pretend  to  account  for  this;  I  simply 
state  it  as  a  fact.  They  are  a  clear-headed, 
energetic,  intelligent  body  of  men,  quick  to 
take  up  with  new  ideas  and  fertile  in  inven 
tions,  and  withal  they  are  liberal  and  broad- 
minded.  For  instance,  a  few  years  ago, 
instead  of  crying  out  against  time-locks  as 
cruel  and  unjust,  in  the  way  that  many  of 
the  profession  did  elsewhere,  the  Syracuse 
burglars  welcomed  the  time-lock  as  an  in 
evitable  step  in  the  scientific  progress  of  the 

8  11 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

age,  and  set  about  devising  a  way  to  cir 
cumvent  it.  The  result  was  that  in  a  few 
months  even  a  stem-winding,  split-second 
time-lock  had  no  terrors  for  them.  But,  as 
you  will  observe  from  my  simple  narrative, 
one  of  the  most  able  of  them  fell  before  me. 
"  I  had  been  down  at  Cortland  on  a  case 
which  kept  me  late.  On  the  way  up  the 
train  collided  with  a  cow  and  delayed  me 
further,  so  that  I  did  not  arrive  in  Syracuse 
till  past  one  o'clock,  and  it  must  have  been 
almost  or  quite  two  before  I  turned  into 
the  street  where  I  lived.  It  was  a  fashion 
able  part  of  the  town,  where  the  houses 
were  generally  large  and  stood  some  dis 
tance  back  from  the  roadway,  with  well- 
kept  lawns  covered  with  shrubbery,  trees, 
fountains,  and  cast-iron  animals  from  the 
leading  foundries.  I  was  proceeding  up 
the  gravel  walk  when  I  noticed  something 
in  the  moonlight  at  my  dining-room  win 
dow.  I  stepped  into  the  shadow  of  a 
cherry-tree  (emblem  of  George  Washing 
ton),  and  saw  that  it  was  a  man  with  a 
short  ladder.  I  instantly  knew  that  it  must 
be  either  a  burglar  or  a  book-agent.  The 
chances  seemed  to  be  in  favor  of  the  burg- 
114 


THE  JUDGE  S   BURGLAR 

lar,  and  it  was  very  clear  that  he  was  about 
to  go  through  my  house. 

"  My  first  thought  was  to  call  for  the 
police;  then  I  remembered  that  there  were 
never  any  of  these  worthy  beings  in  that 
part  of  town  at  such  a  late  hour.  I  was  on 
the  point  of  setting  up  an  outcry  anyhow, 
and  if  I  had  done  so  I  should  have  made 
the  startled  atmosphere  vibrate;  but  it  then 
further  occurred  to  me  that  it  was  custom 
ary  in  our  neighborhood,  when  we  heard 
a  citizen  yelling  '  Burglars! '  or  making  any 
similar  heated  nocturnal  remarks,  for 
everybody  to  turn  over,  and  cover  up  his 
head  with  the  bed-clothing,  and  relapse 
into  further  soothing  slumber;  so  I  re 
frained  from  any  vocal  effort  whatever. 
That  my  shouts  would  probably  frighten 
the  burglar  away  seemed  possible,  but  that 
would  not  be  capturing  him  —  something 
I  had  felt  a  strong  desire  to  do  from  the 
first.  The  idea  of  running  and  fetching-the 
police  also  came  into  my  mind,  but  I  feared 
the  man  would  finish  his  work  and  be  off 
before  I  could  get  back.  Another  notion 
which  popped  into  my  head  was  to  rush 
up  and  seize  him  by  the  legs  as  he  went  up 

"5 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

the  ladder,  and  then  to  handle  him  in  a  bois 
terous  and  unfeeling  manner;  but  for  some 
reason  —  I've  forgotten  what  it  was  now  — 
I  decided  against  this  plan  also.  As  a  his 
torical  fact,  I  may  mention  that  he  was  a 
large  man,  weighing  not  less  than  two  hun 
dred  and  twenty-eight  pounds,  and  had  a 
heavy  iron  jimmy  in  one  hand. 

"  But  when  I  looked  again  I  saw  that 
the  fellow  was  actually  starting  up  the  lad 
der,  and  the  thought  of  my  family  silver 
ware  and  jewelry,  not  to  mention  the  manu 
script  of  my  work,  '  Crabtree  on  Contracts/ 
nerved  me  to  effort.  A  plan  of  action  in 
stantly  flashed  into  my  mind.  I  butted  my 
head  against  the  cherry-tree,  smashing  my 
silk  hat,  and  threw  off  my  overcoat,  rolled 
up  my  trousers,  cast  away  my  collar  and 
cravat,  and  rushed  up  just  as  the  man  was 
half-way  in  the  window,  and  said,  in  a 
gruff  voice, 

"'Wot  yer  doin>,  old  boss?' 

"  He  instantly  came  down  the  ladder, 
feeling  for  his  weapons  in  a  superfluous, 
disagreeable  way. 

"'Coin'  to  work  old  Crabtree,  be  yer?' 
I  continued.  '  Now  see  year,  lemmy  in  wid 
116 


THE   JUDGE  S   BURGLAR 

yer  on  this;  I  was  on  the  ground  'bout  as 
soon  as  you  was.' 

"That's  just  the  way  I  talked  to  him, 
and  it  had  the  desired  effect;  he  put  up  his 
pistol,  grasped  my  hand,  and  we  struck  a 
bargain  to  rob  the  house  together  and  di 
vide  the  swag  equally.  We  couldn't  have 
come  to  an  agreement  with  more  neatness 
and  despatch  if  we  had  been  practical  poli 
ticians  at  the  opening  of  a  campaign.  It's 
just  as  I  told  you  about  those  Syracuse 
burglars  —  they're  a  very  superior  class. 

"  We  accordingly  both  went  up  the  lad 
der,  and  were  soon  hard  at  work  on  the 
lower  floor.  I  explained  my  familiarity 
with  the  surroundings  by  saying  that  I  had 
done  a  little  job  there  two  years  before.  It 
made  my  blood  boil  to  see  him  doubt  the 
genuineness  of  some  of  my  best  solid  silver 
ware;  and  when  the  scoundrel  dragged  out 
a  bottle  of  acid  and  actually  showed  me  that 
it  was  plated,  I  was  disgusted  with  him;  but 
we  got  together  a  good  deal  of  plunder, 
notwithstanding.  'Just  you  lay  low  now 
while  I  go  up  stairs  and  git  the  old  man's 
leather  and  ticker,'  I  said  to  him.  '  You'll 
wake  up  the  old  duffer,  won't  you? '  he  said, 
117 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

anxiously.  '  Not  much/  I  answered.  '  You 
don't  know  what  a  sleeper  he  is.  He  de 
fended  me  once,  and  was  asleep  in  court 
from  start  to  finish,  which  is  why  I  got  two 
years.'  I  went  up,  and  in  a  few  minutes 
came  back  with  my  watch  and  pocket-book, 
and  told  him  that  I  was  snoring  like  a  fog 
horn.  He  recognized  my  ability  as  a  burg 
lar,  and  grasping  my  hand  warmly,  pro 
posed  that  we  always  work  together  in  the 
future. 

"  We  had  now  made  a  pretty  clean  sweep 
of  the  house,  and  he  suggested  that  it  was 
time  for  us  to  bundle  up  our  booty  in  the 
table-cloth  and  be  going,  as  some  of  the 
police  were  early  risers  and  we  might  get 
pinched.  This  seemed  a  prudent  view  of 
the  situation,  and  I  consented.  But  if  you 
think  I  had  any  intention  of  letting  that 
fellow  get  away,  you  are  not  acquainted 
with  my  character.  He  stood  no  more 
show  than  did  the  man  I  collected  the  bill 
from  to-day.  There  was  a  small  closet  at 
one  end  of  the  dining-room  which  had  es 
caped  his  attention.  We  had  got  the  bun 
dle  half  tied  up,  and  he  was  vigorously 
growling  about  the  quality  of  the  silver- 
118 


THE  JUDGE'S  BURGLAR 

ware,  when  I  pointed  out  the  closet  and 
suggested  its  swag-containing  possibilities. 
He  instantly  went  over  and  stepped  inside. 
I  as  promptly  closed  and  locked  the  door. 
Then  I  went  into  the  library,  got  a  sheet 
of  paper,  and  wrote  this  on  it  for  the  benefit 
of  the  servant-girl  in  the  morning: 

NOTICE. — Enclosed  find  one  (i)  burglar. 
Don't  disturb.  CRABTREE. 

"  I  then  closed  the  window,  turned  out 
the  gas,  brought  in  my  overcoat  from  the 
lawn,  and  went  up  stairs  to  bed.  I  was 
tired,  and  in  five  minutes  was  sleeping 
soundly. 

"  Having  been  up  so  late  the  night  be 
fore,  I,  of  course,  did  not  waken  very  early 
in  the  morning,  and  the  entire  family  was 
stirring  some  time  before  I  was.  When 
Mrs.  Crabtree  got  down  she  found  the 
breakfast  served,  but  the  closet  was  undis 
turbed,  our  dining-room  girl  being  a  young 
person  of  extreme  good  sense.  On  the 
girl's  calling  her  attention  to  it,  Mrs.  Crab- 
tree  read  the  note  on  the  door,  simply  re 
marking,  *  Very  well,  do  not  disturb  it/ 
119 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Mrs.  Crabtree,  gentlemen,  is  a  lady  who 
seldom  gets  excited.  The  children,  of 
course,  with  the  natural  curiosity  of  youth, 
asked  some  questions,  but  their  mother 
merely  said  to  them:  'Your  father  has 
got  a  burglar  locked  up  in  there.  It  doesn't 
interest  us.'  As  I  remarked,  Mrs.  Crabtree 
is  a  woman  of  rare  self-possession  and  ex 
traordinary  common-sense.  She  said  after 
wards  that  it  was  amusing  to  hear  our  little 
girl,  aged  four,  shout  through  the  key-hole: 
'  Hello,  Mr.  Burglar! '  and,  '  Did  papa  lock 
you  up  because  you  were  naughty?' 

About  nine  o'clock  I  arose  and  went 
down  to  breakfast.  When  the  burglar 
heard  my  voice  in  the  dining-room  he  made 
some  uncomplimentary  observations  from 
the  other  side  of  the  door,  but  I  paid  no  at 
tention  to  him.  I  related  the  occurrences 
of  the  night  before  to  Mrs.  Crabtree,  and 
after  breakfast  went  into  the  library  and 
spent  a  half-hour  over  the  morning  paper, 
reading  with  especial  interest  Alderman 
Moggerty's  speech  before  the  Council  the 
night  before  in  favor  of  cutting  down  the 
police  force  in  the  interests  of  economy. 
Then  I  went  to  my  office.  Here  the  first 
120 


THE  JUDGE'S  BURGLAR 

thing  I  did  was  to  send  a  note  to  the  chief 
of  police,  as  follows: 

"  DEAR  SIR. — I  have  one  large,  thick 
set  burglar  stored  in  my  china-closet. 
Please  remove  the  same  at  the  expense  of 
the  city  immediately. 

Yours  truly, 

J.  A.  CRABTREE. 

"When  I  went  home  at  noon  he  was 
gone.  What  do  you  think  about  the  latest 
phase  of  the  Cuban  question,  Colonel?" 

"Hold  on,  Judge,"  broke  in  Major 
Dodge;  "finish  your  story  before  you 
tackle  the  little  matter  of  international  dif 
ficulties.  Don't  amputate  the  climax." 

"  Haven't  I  finished  it?  Didn't  I  say  that 
when  I  got  home  the  man  was  gone?  Do 
you  think  I  followed  up  his  subsequent 
career?  Got  an  idea  that  I  sent  him  flowers 
in  jail  and  put  him  on  my  calling  list?  Har 
boring  the  notion  that  I  ran  down  to 
Auburn  prison  every  visitors'  day,  and  had 
a  fatherly  cry  on  that  scoundrel's  neck  for 
old  association's  sake?" 

"You  miss  the  point,  Judge,"  persisted 


121 


MR.  MILO  SUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Major  Dodge.  "Dick  Bailey,  of  Utica, 
told  me  the  whole  story,  and  if  you  don't — " 
"  I  question  the  good  taste  of  this, 
Major,"  interrupted  the  Judge,  with  feeling. 
"  Only  a  life-long  friendship  saves  you.  I 
said  that  when  I  got  home  the  man  was 
gone.  He  was  —  very  much  so.  But  the 
fact  is  the  miserable  wretch  broke  out  after 
my  departure,  intimidated  the  women  and 
children,  locked  them  all  in  another  closet, 
and  then  calmly  looted  the  house,  not  miss 
ing  my  wife's  jewel-case,  put  his  plunder  in 
my  best  alligator-skin  bag,  and  walked  out 
the  front  door,  borrowing  a  light  for  one 
of  my  cigars  from  the  coming  chief  of 
police  at  the  corner,  and  made  his  escape. 
I  got  an  anonymous  note  from  him  the 
next  day  saying  that  if  he  ever  went  into 
the  junk  business  he  would  call  for  the  sil 
verware.  And  that  evening  Moggerty  got 
his  pet  scheme  through,  reducing  the  police 
force  one-half." 


XIII 

YULE-TIDE  MEMORIES 

The  report  becoming  current  about  town 
Christmas  day  that  Mr.  Milo  Bush  had,  the 
night  before,  been  attacked  by  a  pack  of 
hungry  wolves  and  chased  half  a  dozen 
times  around  the  track  of  the  Bon  Pierre 
County  Horse-racing  Association,  as  a 
faithful  chronicler  of  events  I  sought  out 
the  gentleman  to  obtain  the  facts  in  the 
case.  Unhappily  for  the  languishing 
cause  of  local  contemporaneous  history,  it 
speedily  became  apparent  that  there  was 
nothing  in  the  rumor;  indeed,  Mr.  Bush 
stoutly  maintained  that  no  wolf  had  so 
much  as  said  boo  to  him. 

"  I  was,"  he  said,  in  an  explanatory  tone, 
"  down  at  Bob  Cat  last  night  to  a  Christmas 
tree  in  the  Methodist  church.  Feller  put  on 
a  bull-terrier  pup  for  Jim  Cozzens.  Some 
thing  the  minister  said  in  his  remarks  to  the 
infant  class  riled  the  dog  —  he  didn't  seem  to 
know  nothing  about  dogs  anyhow  —  and  he 
123 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

begun  to  bark  and  jump  on  his  chain  —  the 
dog  did,  not  the  minister  —  he  wasn't  hung 
up  with  the  dolls  and  things,  but  was  tied 
to  the  trunk  —  and  he  carried  on  so  that 
nobody  could  get  within  forty  rods  of  the 
tree,  and  they  had  to  fish  off  the  presents 
with  a  split  bamboo  rod.  That's  what  comes 
of  a  man  who  don't  understand  bull-terriers 
trying  to  run  a  Christmas  tree." 

"  Yes,"  I  answered,  reflectively,  "  a  man 
who  doesn't  thoroughly  understand  dogs 
should  avoid  Christmas  festivities." 

"  That's  what,"  returned  Mr.  Bush.  "  Did 
I  ever  tell  you  of  the  fancy,  improved,  and 
patent-applied-for  Christmas  tree  that  we 
had  once  back  in  Pennsylvania?  " 

"  I  don't  recall  it." 

"  Then  1  never  told  you.  It  was  this  'ere 
way:  A  Philadelphia  schoolma'am  come 
out  there  to  Roaring  Spring  to  teach  the 
school.  She  was  one  o'  these  here  \vay-up 
women,  al'ays  a-quoting  poetry  and  such 
guff  and  talking  'bout  art.  She  boarded  at 
old  Deacon  Pulseater's.  Took  down  the 
picture  of  'William  Penn  treating  the  In 
dians  '  in  the  deacon's  parler,  and  put  up 
what  she  called  an  edging.  Some  good 
124 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

j edges  of  pictures  didn't  cotton  to  hern  as 
much  as  they  did  to  the  deacon's,  either. 

"  Well,  the  hollerdays  begun  to  loom  up 
ahead,  and  this  here  schoolma'am  come  out 
with  the  blamedest  idea  you  ever  heard  tell 
of.  It  was  to  have  a  new  kind  of  Christmas 
tree.  She  said  the  old  kind  was  too  com 
mon  and  ord'nary.  She  ranked  'em  with 
the  picture  of  Penn's  treat,  I  reckon.  '  Let 
us  have  something  new  and  picturrecks,' 
says  the  schoolma'am.  Her  notion  was,  in 
place  of  the  tall,  live,  springy  tree,  to  get  an 
old  broken-topped  one,  with  mebby  one  or 
two  limbs  reaching  out  sideways,  and  with 
a  big  holler  trunk  with  moss  on  it.  And 
you  may  put  me  down  amongst  the  Injuns, 
not  taxed,  if  in  a  week  she  didn't  have  every 
last  one  of  us  in  Roaring  Spring  crazy 
about  it. 

"  So  the  day  before  Christmas  a  lot  of  us 
sashayed  out  into  the  woods  for  a  likely  tree. 
We  found  one  with  a  trunk  as  big  as  a  barr'l, 
or  bigger,  broke  off  fifteen  or  twenty  feet 
from  the  ground,  leaning  over  a  good  deal, 
and  with  one  long  limb  and  two  or  three 
small  ones.  We  rooted  it  up  and  loaded  it 
on  the  deacon's  sleigh,  which  wasn't  hard, 

125 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

being  as  it  was  holler;  though  I  reco'lect  re 
marking,  '  Boys/  says  I, '  this  is  the  all-fired- 
est  heaviest  holler  tree  I  ever  lifted  on' — 
just  like  that,  I  says;  but  somebody  speaks 
up  and  says  he,  that  I  never  lifted  on  no  kind 
of  a  tree  before,  which  wa'iit  fur  from  the 
truth,  so  I  didn't  say  nothing  more.  Well, 
we  set  up  the  tree  in  the  Presbyterian 
church,  and  everybody  brought  their  pres 
ents,  and  the  schoolma'am  and  the  com 
mittee  put  'em  on,  with  pop-corn  and  red 
apples  and  taller  candles.  It  was  the  fun 
niest-looking  tree  you  ever  seen,  with  a  lot 
of  rocks  around  it  covered  with  cotton 
bat'n',  to  look  like  snow,  and  a  stuffed  owl 
on  the  big  limb;  but  the  schoolma'am  was 
happy,  and  we  didn't  care.  We'd  a-brought 
in  Paxawaxa  Mountain  and  set  it  up  for  her 
if  she'd  a-said  so.  It's  cur'ous  about  school- 
ma'ams,  'specially  Philadelphia  school- 
ma'ams.  Man  in  their  hands  becomes  no 
better  than  a  —  no,  sir,  not  a  doggasted 
speck  better  than  a  yaller-faced  Chinaman. 
"  Well,  sir,  at  seven  o'clock  that  evening 
we  was  all  in  that  church,  waiting  for  the 
thing  to  open  up.  The  schoolma'am  set 
on  the  front  seat,  a-smiling  and  a-beaming, 
126 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

and  we  all  set  on  back  seats,  also  a-smiling 
and  a-beaming,  just  because  we  had  made 
her  happy  and  had  got  something  new  in 
Christmas  trees.  Young  man,  we  had. 

"  Then  Deacon  Pulseater  got  up  to  make 
some  suitable  remarks  to  the  infant  class. 
The  deacon  was  sup'rentendent  of  the  Sun 
day-school,  and  he  done  it  every  Christmas, 
though  this  time,  being  soft  on  the  school- 
ma'am  and  tickled  to  death  over  the  igee  of 
the  tree,  like  the  rest  of  us,  he  let  himself 
out  stronger  than  usual.  '  Little  ones,'  says 
the  deacon,  *  we-uns  have  gathered  together 
here  in  this  here  place  for  another  happy 
Yool-tide ' —  that's  what  the  deacon  said, 
just  like  that — 'Yool-tide' —  got  it  from  the 
schoolma'am,  you  see.  '  We  are  here  again/ 
says  the  deacon,  a-rubbing  his  hands  and 
sort  of  swelling  up,  '  once  more  to  make 
glad  the  hearts  of  loved  ones.  But  we  have 
not  the  old-fashioned  tree,  have  we?  No, 
little  ones,  we  have  not  the  old-fashioned 
tree.  We  have  a  better  tree  —  a  tree  which 
is  beautiful  and  picturrecks.  See  its  grand 
old  trunk,  children,  which  has  braved  the 
ripsnorting  gales  of  ten  thousand  winters. 
But,  my  little  hearers,  that  trunk  is  holler, 
127 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

like  the  sins  and  vanities  of  this  world.  It 
is  holler,  I  repeat.  Do  you  reckon  there's 
a  squirrel  down  in  the  holler  trunk  of  this 
here  old  tree?  Who  knows?  I  think  there 
is  a  squirrel  down  in  it.  I  thought  I  heard 
one  then.  What  little  boy  will  volunteer  to 
go  down  into  the  holler  trunk  of  our  old  tree 
and  drive  out  the  squirrel?  Ah!  I  see  hands 
raised  —  one,  two,  three  little  boys  want  to 
go  down  into  the  holler  trunk  of  our  old 
tree  and  drive  out  the  squirrel.  But  there 
are  no  bad,  dangerous  beasts  down  in  the 
holler  trunk  of  our  old  tree  —  oh  no !  There 
are  no — '  Just  then  the  deacon  looked 
'round,  and  seen  a  big,  black,  hungry  b'ar 
coming  up  out  of  the  top  of  the  trunk. 
'  Children/  yelled  the  deacon,  '  the  blame 
thing  is  loaded  after  all! '  and  you  may  lar 
rup  me  if  the  deacon  didn't  go  over  the 
backs  of  them  pews  for  the  door  like  a 
tight-rope  walker,  hollering  bloody  murder 
every  jump,  and  the  rest  of  us  wa'n't  much 
behind  him;  and  the  only  one  of  us  that  had 
plain  fool  sense  enough  to  think  of  the 
schoolma'am  was  Hank  Scott,  and  he  come 
out  last,  a-carrying  her  right  in  his  arms  in 
a  dead  faint;  and  Hank  said  that  when  he 
128 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

left  there  was  four  b'ars  out  and  more  b'iling 
up  into  sight;  and  two  weeks  later  I'll  be 
snaked  if  Hank  didn't  marry  the  school- 
ma'am;  though  some  people  said,  a  long 
time  afterwards,  that  Hank  did  say  to  'em 
one  day  that  he  wished  he'd  staid  and  faced 
the  b'ars  like  a  hero  an'  a  gentleman  and  let 
some  other  blooming  idjet  rescue  the 
schoolma'am. 

"  And  it  seems  to  me  while  we're  a-talking 
'bout  it,  that  this  here  hornswaggled  Yool- 
tide  always  makes  trouble  fer  somebody. 
It  ain't  what  it's  cracked  up  to  be.  There 
was  the  Perfessor,  that  used  to  live  here  in 
Signal  Butte.  He  wasn't  a  man  to  borrow 
trouble,  either  —  though  ready  enough  to 
borrow  anything  else.  In  fact,  he  was  the 
ca'mest  man,  this  here  Perfessor  was,  the 
frozenest,  ca'mest  man,  'specially  about  his 
debts,  that  ever  struck  these  diggings.  Pre 
senting  a  bill  to  the  Perfessor  was  about  like 
asking  a  wooden  cigar-store  Injun  to  trans 
late  a  Chinese  laundry  check.  And  debts 
was  just  all  he  had,  too,  except  his  fiddle 
and  a  wife  and  six  children. 

"The  Perfessor  was  a  lib'ral  buyer  — 
he'd  buy  anything  he  could  get  trusted  for. 

9  I29 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

'  Charge  it/  was  always  his  word,  and 
mostly  the  folks  would  do  it,  too.  He  was 
smooth  —  smooth  as  the  back  of  his  own 
fiddle.  Meant  to  pay,  of  course;  strictly 
honest;  but  just  didn't  never  have  it. 
Wouldn't  work  —  do  nothing  but  fiddle  and 
whittle  and  smoke  and  talk.  Used  to  be 
fond  o'  quoting  from  Shakespeare,  too,  as, 
'All  flesh  is  grass,'  'Smile  and  the  world 
smiles  with  you,'  '  The  early  bird  snatches 
the  worm,'  and  so  forth.  He  might  be  right 
in  the  middle  of  this  kind  of  talk  at  the  gro 
cery  when  a  man  presented  a  bill,  but  he 
would  just  take  it,  wave  it  in  the  air  slow 
once  or  twice,  like  a  cat  waving  her  tail 
when  you  let  her  out  the  front  door,  and 
then  say,  '  Young  man,  I'll  file  it,'  and  put 
it  in  his  pocket.  He  would  file  it,  too.  Had 
a  file  at  home  made  out  of  six  feet  of  light 
ning-rod  set  in  a  piece  of  plank,  sharp  end 
up,  and  every  bill  he  got  he'd  stab  it  on  this, 
till  it  was  full,  then  he'd  clean  'em  off,  swap 
'em  to  a  tin-peddler  at  four  cents  a  pound, 
and  start  new.  One  man  once  got  tired  and 
disgusted,  and  so  just  sent  him  a  receipted 
bill  and  closed  the  account  up.  The  Per- 
fessor  come  right  down  to  the  store,  and 
130 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 


says  he :  '  See  here,  what  d'you  sign  your 
name  down  here  for?  Never  seen  that 
done  before.' 

"  After  a  while  he  sawed  a  hole  in  his  front 
door,  so's  the  collectors  could  shove  their 
bills  in  if  he  didn't  happen  to  be  at  home. 
Still  nights  sometimes  he  would  move  his 
lightning-rod  stab  out  on  the  piazzer  with 
a  card  on  it,  '  File  Your  Bills  Here/  and 
there  it  would  stand  half  the  forenoon,  loom 
ing  up  like  the  steeple  on  a  Tiscopal  church. 
When  he  walked  round  town  you'd  see  a 
percession  of  bill-collectors  tailing  along  be 
hind  him  like  the  crowd  following  a  man 
putting  up  circus  posters.  But  he  was  just 
as  ca'm,  and  hardly  seemed  to  notice  'em. 
'  It  is  the  way  of  the  world,'  he  would  say. 
'  I  am  advertised  by  my  loving  friends.'  I 
never  heered  him  complain  but  once,  and 
that  was  the  time  he  hung  up  his  stocking  at 
Christmas. 

"He  come  into  the  grocery  Christmas 
morning  looking  gloomy.  'Wot's  the 
matter,  Perfessor?'  says  Shanks.  'Cheer 
up  on  this  here  glad  day.  "  Smile,  and  the 
world  smiles  with  you,"  you  know.'  '  Yes/ 
says  the  Perfessor,  fetching  a  sigh,  '  but  that 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

ain't  all  of  it.  "  Weep,  and  you  weep  alone," 
the  mighty  bard  adds,  and  with  trooth.  The 
folks  in  this  here  town  are  mercenary 
wretches.  They  cannot  bury  business  even 
at  Yool-tide.'  '  More  suppermentary  per- 
ceedings?'  asks  Shanks.  'Worse  nor  that,' 
answers  the  Perfessor.  '  Last  night  my 
wife  says  to  me,  "  My  dear,  the  young  uns 
are  a-going  to  hang  up  their  stockings  in 
the  good  old-fashioned  way,  and  they  want 
their  dad  to  j'in  'em  and  hang  up  his'n."  I 
was  fiddling,  so  I  just  wags  my  head  and 
says,  "All  right,  my  dear."  Always  ready 
to  do  anything  for  the  little  uns,  if  I  do  say 
it  myself.  So  my  wife  druv  some  nails  in 
the  wall  along  back  of  the  stove,  and  the 
children  hung  up  their  stockings.  My  old 
est  boy  is  like  his  father,  with  an  inquiring 
mind,  and  says  he,  "  How's  Sandy  Claws 
going  to  get  down  that  there  stove-pipe  with 
his  pack  —  that's  what  /  want  to  know?" 
"  Oh,"  says  I,  "  we'll  just  leave  the  winder 
unfastened  and  up  about  a  inch,  and  he  can 
see  it  and  h'ist  it  furder,  and  come  in  that 
way."  So  we  done  it;  but  'fore  we  went  to 
bed  this  here  man  Cooper  that  runs  the  fur 
niture-store  dropped  in  for  a  neighborly 
132 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

chat,  and  we  showed  him  how  we  was  going 
to  'range  things  for  Sandy  Claws. 

"'The  young  uns  got  us  up  early  this 
morning,  and  when  I  went  down  I  was 
tickled  to  see  my  sock  stuffed  full  of  pres 
ents.  There  was  also  an  easy-chair  by  the 
side  of  it,  labelled  "  From  your  loving  wife." 
My  heart  throbbed  with  joy,  and  pick 
ing  up  my  vierlin,  I  extracted  a  few 
notes  of  heavenly  harmony  expressive 
of  my  in'ard  emotions  while  the  chil 
dren  emptied  their  stockings.  "  Now 
look  at  yourn,  my  dear,"  says  my  wife. 
"  It  seems  to  be  powerful  full.  Reckon 
you  got  more'n  your  share."  So  I 
takes  my  sock  from  the  nail,  and  the  first 
thing  I  brings  out  is  a  bill  from  old  Jones 
for  groceries  —  groceries,  mind  you,  which 
was  et  up  months  ago!  Then  I  pulls  out 
another,  from  Jacobs,  for  a  suit  of  clothes 
which  was  wore  out  and  give  way  to  a 
tramp.  The  next  was  from  Jackson  & 
Brown  for  a  set  of  dishes  which  has  been 
all  broke  but  two  plates.  So  it  went  plumb 
to  the  bottom  of  the  sock  —  nothing  but 
bills,  inserted  through  the  winder  by  the 
grasping  and  treacherous  hands  of  my  fel- 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

low-townsmen.  I  sunk  into  my  chair  with 
a  heart  of  lead.  "  Cheer  up,  pop,"  says  my 
oldest  boy.  "You  have  your  easy-chair 
anyhow."  "Troo,"  says  I;  "my  wife  did 
not  forget  me.  It  is  at  home  that  a  man 
finds  his  real  friends.  The  world  is  cold 
and  crool  and  unfeeling.  O  woman,"  goes 
on  I,  "a  ministering  angel  thou!"  and  I 
chirped  up  and  begun  to  whistle  as  I  pulled 
on  my  sock.  I  felt  something  in  the  toe, 
hauled  it  off,  inserted  my  hand,  and  drew 
out  a  bill  from  Cooper  for  the  chair/ 

"  And  I'll  be  hanged,"  said  Mr.  Bush  in 
closing,  "  if  the  Perfessor  didn't  put  his  head 
in  his  hands  and  bu'st  into  tears  right  there 
in  the  grocery.  It  touched  us  so  that  we 
took  up  a  collection  and  bought  him  a 
pound  of  smoking-tobacker.  But  he  never 
got  over  it,  and  a  month  later  moved  away 
to  Montana,  and  that  was  the  last  we  ever 
seen  of  him. 

"  And  that  ain't  all  I've  got  laid  up  agin 
this  here  season  of  peace  on  yearth.  There 
is  a  pussonal  matter.  It  was  back  in  Penn 
sylvania  when  I  was  a  young  man.  Knowed 
a  feller  there  that  was  the  likeliest  fool  in 
the  State.  Biggest  fool  I  ever  seen. 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

Butcher  was  his  name  — Jerry  Butcher. 
He  wasn't  one  of  these  here  amatoor  fools 
that  just  work  at  it  for  fun,  but  a  reg'lar 
pcrfcssional  fool.  Didn't  know  enough  to 
ache  when  he  was  hurt.  Couldn^t 
a-scratched  a  match  on  a  grindstun  —  not  if 

he  tried. 

"  Well,  this  Jerry  got  it  into  his  head  that 
he  was  good-looking.  Thought  he  was  a 
reg'lar  Ap  Holler  —  whoever  he  was.  Got 
a  notion  the  women  was  all  thinking  about 
him.  Finally  he  acchooly  got  soft  on  the 
same  gal  I  was  sort  o'  shinning  up  to.  I  was 
some  weak  them  days  myself,  or  I  wouldn't 
a-been  took  in  by  that  gal.  Evenchooly  I 
seen  throo  that  gal. 

"  One  Christmas  old  Uncle  Peleg  Twig- 
ger,  who  was  the  father  of  the  gal,  give  a 
sort  of  a  shindy,  and  asked  in  we  neighbors. 
I  went,  and  so  did  this  here  Jerry,  and  a 
passel  of  other  folks,  mostly  fools.  The  gal, 
Jerusha,  was  there  making  bigger  fools  of 
most  of  'em.  Us  younger  people  indulged 
in  various  pastimes  of  a  more  or  less  intel- 
lecchooal  character,  such  as  hunt-the-slip 
per,  Copenhagen,  and  sich,  while  the  more 
elderly  folks  played  old  sledge  and  drunk 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

hard  cider  in  the  kitchen.  This  Jerry  was 
all  the  time  getting  betwixt  me  and  Jerusha 
in  his  fool  way  —  a-curling  up  his  mustache 
and  a-striking  attitoods.  Old  Si  Hooker 
finally  struck  up  with  fiddle  music,  and  we 
danced  —  tripped  the  light  bombastic  toe, 
was  what  Jerry  said.  I  could  a-knocked 
him  down.  And  mostly  he  tripped  it  with 
Jerusha,  too  —  he  got  four  dances,  and  I  got 
one. 

"  Then  the  next  thing  on  the  porgramme 
was  the  distribution  of  the  Christmas  pres 
ents.  In  the  past  they'd  had  a  Christmas 
tree,  but  no,  that  wouldn't  do  for  Jerusha 
this  time.  To  tell  the  truth,  that  gal  was 
just  about  as  foolish  as  Jerry.  I  didn't  see 
it  then,  but  I  seen  it  later.  Woman,  thy 
name  is  flayalty,  observes  the  poet —  and 
he  hit  it  pertty  near  right. 

"  No,  nothing  would  do  for  Jerusha  this 
time  but  a  Sandy  Claus  —  reg'lar  live  tom 
fool,  with  a  pack  and  whiskers,  a-playing  he 
was  Sandy  Claus.  *  Mr.  Bush/  says  Jeru 
sha,  a-purring  like  a  Maltese  cat — '  Mr. 
Bush,  will  you  honor  us  by  being  our  Sandy 
Claus?'  '  Sartenly,'  says  I;  'it  is  yours  to 


136 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

command;'  just  like  that,  I  says,  beginning 
to  catch  on  to  Jerry's  ways. 

"  Well,  they  got  me  my  pack  and  my 
whiskers,  and  I  put  'em  on,  and  then  says 
Jerusha,  '  You  will  find  a  ladder  outside  to 
get  up  to  the  chimbley  with.'  *  Wot,'  says 
I,  '  have  I  got  to  come  down  the  jim-fizzled 
chimbley?'  'Of  course,'  says  she;  'all 
Sandy  Clauses  do.  The  fire  is  out.  Our 
chimbley  is  large.  It  is  all  for  the  children, 
you  know,  Mr.  Bush.  Don't  you  love  chil 
dren,  Mr.  Bush? '  '  Yes,'  says  I  —just  like 
that — 'yes,  jig-wiggle  'em,  I  love  children, 
but  I'm  no  chimbley-swab.'  Then  that  there 
Jerry  Butcher  come  up,  his  elbows  sticking 
out,  and  says  he:  'Is  yer  Sandy  Clans 
balky,  Miss  Jerusha?  Let  me  be  yer  Sandy 
Claus.  I  love  to  make  happy  the  little  in- 
nercent  children.'  Then  I  goes  out  into  the 
night,  ready  to  back  down  into  a  volcainer. 

"  The  bore  of  that  there  chimbley  was  not 
large,  but  by  slipping  my  pack  up  on  the 
back  of  my  neck,  and  folding  my  whiskers 
and  holding  'em  under  my  chin,  I  managed 
to  get  started.  Soot  got  in  my  eyes,  and  I 
was  forced  to  omit  many  remarks  which 
would  have  fit  the  occasion,  for  fear  it  would 

137 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

also  get  in  my  mouth.  Them  remarks  I 
said  inwardly,  however,  and  they  applied  to 
the  chimbley,  the  idgit  Jerry,  the  gal,  and 
the  happy,  innercent  children  which  I  loved. 

"  I  calculated  that  I'd  gone  rooting  and 
scraping  down  that  hole  about  five  hundred 
feet,  when  I  stopped  a-straddle  of  something. 
I  felt  about,  and  found  it  to  be  an  iron  rod, 
which  seemed  to  a-been  put  in  by  the  man 
wot  built  the  thing  to  hold  the  sides  to 
gether.  I  h'isted  up,  but  my  pack  was 
catched.  I  tried  to  swing  over,  like  a  man 
getting  off  of  hossback,  but  there  wasn't 
room.  My  whiskers  had  come  unpacked, 
and  were  wiped  up  over  my  face  mostly,  but 
I  could  not  get  my  hands  up  to  brush  them 
down.  The  voice  of  the  happy,  innercent 
children  which  I  loved  come  to  my  ears. 
The  distant  strains  of  the  fiddle  floated  up. 
I  could  hear  Jerry  and  Jerusha  talking 
gayly.  My  feelings,  repressed  too  long, 
bust  out.  Opening  my  mouth,  regardless 
of  both  soot  and  artificial  hair,  I  spoke  my 
mind  freely  as  become  a  man. 

"  My  remarks  attracted  the  attention  of 
all,  and  I  heard  the  women  removing  the 
children  from  the  room  before  I  could  say 

138 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

more.  Then  I  heard  Jerusha  looking  up 
the  chimbley.  '  I  can  see  Mr.  Bush's  legs,' 
says  she.  Then  he  himself  must  be  near,' 
says  Jerry.  '  Are  you  stuck? '  calls  old  Mrs. 
Twigger.  'Wot  did  I  say?'  says  I.  'I 
would  dislike  to  repeat  wot  you  said/  says 
she.  Then  they  all  begun  to  talk.  '  We 
must  rescue  him/  says  Jerusha;  'the  chil 
dren  are  waiting  for  their  presents.'  '  Wot 
can  we  do?'  says  old  Si.  '  I  suggest  push 
ing  of  him  down  somehow/  says  Jerry. 
'  Couldn't  we  drop  something  on  him  from 
the  top  of  the  chimbley  —  say  an  anvil?' 
They  all  said  no.  '  Then/  says  Jerry,  '  why 
not  h'ist  him  up?  Wot  do  you  say  to  a  keg 
of  powder  in  the  fireplace?  Let  us  blow 
the  young  man  who  was  so  anxious  to  be 
Sandy  Claus  out  the  top  of  the  chimbley 
like  a  b'iling  volcainer.' 

"  Then  they  shut  the  idgit  up,  and  brought 
a  crowbar,  and  after  reaching  up  and  meas 
uring  with  a  long  stick  and  locating  me, 
they  all  went  up  stairs,  and  begun  to  dig 
throo  the  bricks  where  I  was.  '  Let  me 
wield  the  bar  which  shall  liberate  a  hero/ 
says  Jerry,  and  they  let  him.  '  Be  careful ; 
do  not  overdo/  I  heard  Jerusha  saying  to 

T39 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

him.  '  A  brave  and  an  innercent  man  is 
imprisoned  —  shall  I  spare  my  muscle?' 
says  Jerry.  By-and-by  he  got  a  hole 
through.  I  wiggled  around  and,  seeing  my 
chance,  did  not  spare  my  muscle,  but  kicked 
him  in  the  jaw  like  a  mule,  knocking  him 
off  the  chair  he  was  standing  on,  pretending 
it  was  a  mistake  as  I  backed  out  the  hole. 
He  struck  the  floor,  and  Jerusha  rushed 
up.  '  Alars,  my  Jeremiah/  shrieks  she; 
'  dead,  dead!  Alars! '  '  No,'  says  I,  '  but  he 
will  be  when  I  can  get  clear  out,'  my  head 
still  in  the  chimbley.  Jerry  got  up,  with  a 
little  blood  on  his  mouth  where  I'd  kicked 
him.  'Wot!  Heavings,  my  Jeremiah 
bleeds!'  screams  Jerusha.  'He  will  die! 
Yes,  yes,  he  will  die!'  and  she  faints  in  his 
arms.  Just  then  her  father  comes  in,  pretty 
short-sighted  from  the  cider.  '  Wot  yer 
holding  my  darter  that  way  for?'  says  he. 
'  She  is  fainted/  says  Jerry.  '  Besides,  we're 
going  to  be  married,  you  know.'  '  That's 
wot  you  be/  says  the  old  man.  '  Here, 
Squire,  marry  'em ! '  '  But  the  gal  is  in  a 
faint/  says  the  Squire.  '  I  have  recovered/ 
says  Jerusha,  firm  as  a  rock.  So  the  Squire 
married  'em  right  there,  with  me  all  out  of 
140 


YULE-TIDE   MEMORIES 

the  chimbley  except  my  pack,  which 
wouldn't  come  throo  the  hole,  so  I  hung 
with  my  toes  a  foot  from  the  floor  dooring 
the  bootiful  and  impressive  ceremony. 
Then  Jerusha  looks  up,  and  says  she,  '  Mr. 
Bush,  if  yer  face  was  clean,  mebby  you 
might  be  allowed  to  kiss  the  bride.'  Then 
I  kicked  at  Jerry  again,  but  missed  him, 
and  they  cut  me  down,  and  I  went  home, 
thinking  to  myself  wot  a  blessed  thing  is  a 
happy  Christmas." 


XIV 

A  SUBURBAN   ADVENTURE 

"But,  Doctor,"  I  protested,  "what  is  the 
man  good  for?  You  say  he  can't  milk, 
can't  drive,  doesn't  know  how  to  take  care 
of  carriages  or  horses,  broke  the  lawn- 
mower  the  first  time  he  tried  to  use  it,  and 
is  unable  to  distinguish  between  a  cabbage- 
plant  and  a  California  redwood.  What  is 
his  strong  point?" 

The  Doctor  laughed,  and  looked  toward 
his  wife  at  the  other  end  of  the  table. 

"  Well,"  he  said  slowly,  "  we've  had  An 
drew  three  months,  and  I  don't  know  as  I 
can  say  what  his  strong  point  is."  He 
paused,  and  then  added,  cheerfully:  "Un 
less  it  is  smoking.  He  is  a  good  smoker; 
I've  seldom  seen  a  better.  And  I'll  give 
him  credit  for  economy  and  good  sense  in 
that  line,  too;  he  smokes  a  pipe  —  since  I 
locked  up  my  cigars.  Yes,  Andrew's  strong 
point  is  the  steady,  long-distance  smoke." 


142 


A  SUBURBAN  ADVENTURE 

"  My  dear,  you're  too  hard  on  Andrew/' 
came  from  the  other  end  of  the  table.  "  You 
know  he  has  clone  good  work  at  painting." 

"  Yes,"  answered  the  Doctor,  "  he  does 
like  to  paint.  I  told  him  to  paint  a  new 
fence  which  I  recently  had  built  around  the 
lot  back  of  the  barn.  Before  I  knew  it  he 
had  given  it  six  coats.  I  have  no  idea  how 
many  more  he  has  put  on  at  odd  times 
since,  but  I  know  it  has  noticeably  increased 
its  apparent  bulk.  The  posts  of  that  fence 
look  as  if  they  were  wearing  diving-suits, 
and  the  barbed  wire  along  the  top  has  the 
appearance  of  a  chain  cable.  I  ran  down 
the  Jersey  coast  for  a  couple  of  days,  and 
he  painted  the  barn  and  carriage-house. 
He  painted  'em  roofs  and  all,  and  when  I 
got  back  raw  paint  was  dripping  off  the 
eaves.  I  remonstrated,  and  next  day  I 
found  him  in  the  cellar  of  the  barn  painting 
that.  Yesterday  I  saw  him  peering  down 
the  well,  and  I  can  only  fear  the  worst." 

"  But  why  do  you  keep  him?"  I  insisted. 

The  Doctor  looked  embarrassed,  almost 
sheepish.  I  saw,  when  it  was  too  late,  that 
it  was  like  asking  a  man  who  is  a  drunkard 
why  he  drinks.  He  looked  toward  the  other 

143 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

end  of  the  table,  but  got  no  help.  At  last 
he  said,  simply:  "I  don't  know.  But,  as 
I  said,  he  smokes  freely  and  easily.  And 
as  long  as  the  landscape  holds  out  I  think 
I  can  depend  on  him  to  paint." 

Two  hours  later  I  suggested  the  advisa 
bility  of  my  returning  to  the  city.  The  Doc 
tor  looked  troubled. 

<k  I  was  going  to  drive  you  to  the  station,'' 
he  said,  "  but  I  just  got  a  telephone  call 
which  is  urgent." 

"  But  can't  Andrew  drive  me?"  I  asked. 

"  Well,  he  can  start  with  you,  and  he 
might  get  you  there.  He  has  driven  me 
there  a  few  times;  though  it  is  expensive  for 
me,  because  I  have  to  treat  the  people  he 
runs  down  free.  I'll  tell  him  to  take  the 
buckboard  and  old  Bob,  and  reduce  the  dan 
ger  to  a  minimum." 

"  Oh,  I'll  risk  it,"  I  laughed. 

"  But,"  interposed  my  hostess,  turning  to 
her  husband,  "  this  is  not  the  way  to  use  a 
guest." 

"  Well,  I  know  it  isn't,"  said  the  Doctor, 
half  impatiently.     "  But  what  can  I  do?     I 
-I  —  of  course  I'll  treat  you  free  too,"  he 
said,  as  he  turned  to  me. 
144 


A  SUBURBAN  ADVENTURE 

I  laughed  again,  and  intimated  that  I  felt 
little  fear. 

"  But  you  don't  know  Andrew,''  went  on 
the  Doctor.  "  I  told  you  that  he  can't  milk 
at  all;  in  point  of  fact,  he  is  a  worse  driver 
than  he  is  milker.  You'll  find  that  going 
to  the  station  with  him  will  be  a  good  deal 
like  Horace  Greeley's  famous  ride  with 
Hank  Monk  which  Mark  Twain  tells 
about." 

In  a  few  minutes  Andrew  was  at  the  door 
with  the  buckboard.  He  had  a  bland,  hon 
est  Scandinavian  face  which  suggested  a 
clear  conscience  and  the  prospect  of  a  good 
week  for  painting.  I  took  my  seat  beside 
him,  and  we  were  off. 

"  Put  your  right  arm  around  the  back  of 
the  seat  and  be  ready  to  seize  the  dash 
board  with  your  other  hand,"  called  the 
Doctor. 

I  was  convinced  that  my  friend  was  mak 
ing  game  of  me,  and  glanced  at  my  watch. 
Fatal  move! 

"  I'm  afraid  we  haven't  much  time  in 
which  to  make  that  train,"  I  said. 

"Yah,  aye  tank  not,"  answered  Andrew. 
He  dropped  the  rein  from  his  right  hand, 

10  145 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

seized  the  whip,  and  struck  old  Bob  a  re 
sounding  crack.  It  could  not  have  hurt 
much,  but  it  was  a  sort  of  a  transcontinental 
cut;  as  the  whip  momentarily  rested  along 
his  side  it  reminded  me  of  a  railroad  map  of 
a  line  reaching  from  New  York  to  San 
Francisco.  The  animal  broke  into  a  run 
and  veered  sharply  to  the  left.  Andrew 
dropped  the  left  line,  seized  the  other  in  both 
hands,  and  drew  him  squarely  across  the 
street.  A  bevy  of  girls  in  Sunday  frocks 
scrambled  up  a  retaining-wall  and  onto  a 
lawn  as  we  cut  a  scallop  in  the  sidewalk  and 
then  went  tearing  down  the  middle  of  the 
street. 

"  De  boss  are  not  use  to  driving,"  said 
Andrew,  as  he  slapped  the  reins  up  and 
down.  "  Aye  tank  he  be  a  colt." 

A  man  on  a  bicycle  fell  off  as  we  took  a 
crossing  diagonally  and  rounded  the  first 
corner  on  two  wheels.  The  animal's  gait 
was  a  moderate  run,  but  we  were  neverthe 
less  making  slow  general  progress,  since 
two-thirds  of  our  effort  was  taken  up  in 
crossing  from  one  gutter  to  the  other,  as 
Andrew  hauled  first  on  the  left  line  and 
then  on  the  right. 

146 


A  SUBURBAN  ADVENTURE 

"Aye  tank  he  never  was  broke  right/' 
said  Andrew.  "Aye'll  learn  him  not  to 
shy,"  and  he  dropped  both  reins,  took  the 
whip,  and  applied  it  lightly,  but  with  an  all- 
embracing  end-to-end  touch  which  drove 
the  animal  mad.  We  were  rushing  straight 
down  the  middle  of  the  street,  and  I  was 
congratulating  myself  that  it  could  not  last 
long  at  that  rate,  when  Andrew  took  up  the 
lines  again  and  began  to  pull  blindly. 

"  See ;  he  begin  to  shy  again.  What  you 
scart  about,  you  loafer?  —  aye  don't  see 
not'ings." 

A  woman  screamed  and  dragged  a  baby- 
carriage  out  of  the  way.  We  snipped  a  bit 
of  bark  off  a  shade  tree,  and  the  next  sec 
ond  winged  a  lamp-post  on  the  opposite  side 
of  the  street.  A  man  leaped  from  a  cross 
ing,  and  we  ran  down  his  straw  hat.  We 
took  the  next  corner  close-hauled,  the  for 
ward  wheel  passing  one  side  of  a  low 
hydrant  and  the  corresponding  hind  wheel 
the  other. 

"See;  he  try  to  upset  us  on  de  water 
spout,"  said  Andrew.     "  Aye'll  learn  you !  " 
and  he  leaned  over  the  dash-board  and  again 
applied  the  whip  on  the  transequine  plan. 
147 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

The  animal  went  ahead  furiously.  Some 
women  ran  screaming  out  of  the  way.  A 
man  shouted. 

"  There's  a  policeman  right  ahead ! "  I 
cried. 

"  All  right.  Aye  know  dat  fellow.  He 
can't  stop  us.  Aye'll  run  over  'im." 

He  clapped  the  whip  in  his  mouth  cross 
wise,  braced  himself,  and  zigzagged  in  the 
direction  of  the  officer.  Left  alone,  the 
horse  would  certainly  have  gone  over  him; 
but  a  lucky,  though  unintentional,  pull  by 
Andrew  caused  us  to  pass  to  the  right,  and 
we  only  grazed  the  official  legs  with  our 
near  wheels.  We  snapped  a  spoke  from  a 
carriage  which  was  struggling  out  of  our 
way,  and  then  rushed  straight  for  a  me 
morial  monument  to  a  Revolutionary  hero. 

"Look  out!"  I  shouted. 

"  Aye  sees  it,"  answered  Andrew.  "  Aye 
won't  hit  it.  Aye  knows  how  to  drive." 
He  dropped  one  line,  half  rose,  and  put  his 
whole  strength  on  the  other.  It  saved  us, 
and  we  brought  off  only  one  iron  picket 
from  the  surrounding  fence.  We  crossed 
the  street  and  struck  a  stone  horse-block. 
The  buckboard  threw  us  high  into  the  air, 
148 


A  SUBURBAN  ADVENTURE 

but  caught  us  adroitly  as  we  came  down. 
Then  we  turned  in  and  crossed  the  corner 
of  a  front  yard  and  went  through  the  shower 
of  a  lawn-sprinkler.  We  took  to  the  street 
again  and  knocked  down  a  man. 

"Aye'll  get  you  dare  in  time,"  said  An 
drew,  talking  without  removing  the  whip 
from  his  mouth.  "  Aye  drove  in  de  old 
country.  Yust  you  hold  on."  We  were 
on  the  last  reach  for  the  station.  Fortu 
nately  the  horse  was  now  running  away  in 
good  earnest,  and  Andrew  had  largely  lost 
control  of  him.  The  buckboard  was  rock 
ing  like  a  boat  in  a  heavy  swell,  first  on  the 
wheels  of  one  side,  and  then  on  those  of  the 
other.  A  score  of  dogs  were  in  full  cry 
behind  us,  but  their  chase  was  hopeless. 
We  ran  down  a  flock  of  geese,  and  they  rose 
all  around  us.  Men  ahead  were  shouting 
to  other  drivers  to  clear  the  track. 

"  Aye  drove  when  aye  was  a  boy.  Aye 
like  to  drive,"  explained  Andrew. 

We  dashed  across  the  plaza  before  the 
station. 

"  Right  here,"  I  shouted  to  Andrew,  as  I 
saw  that  we  must  run   down  a  group   of 
hack-men  if  we  went  nearer.     He  threw  his 
149 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

whole  weight  on  the  lines,  and  the  horse 
stopped  stiff-legged.  I  went  out  over  the 
forward  wheel  and  struck  the  ground  on  my 
hands  and  knees.  I  scrambled  to  my  feet, 
picked  up  my  umbrella,  which  Andrew  had 
jettisoned,  and  ran  for  the  station.  He 
started  the  horse  with  a  crack  of  the  whip, 
missed  going  over  me  by  a  hair's-breadth, 
turned  a  square  corner,  and  tore  back  across 
the  plaza  and  up  the  street.  I  collapsed  on 
the  nearest  bench,  and  waited  twenty  min 
utes  for  the  train. 


XV 

JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER'S  GULCH 

Though  Mr.  Mark  Wallis  had,  in  the 
course  of  thirty-five  years,  lost  a  good  deal 
of  time  in  walking  from  town  to  town,  he 
nevertheless  had  had  experience  in  many 
different  printing-offices,  and  after  the  paper 
was  off  the  press  Friday  night,  was  fond  of 
drawing  on  his  reminiscences.  On  one  oc 
casion,  finding  himself,  happily  for  me,  in  a 
loquacious  mood,  he  related  the  following 
valuable  incident: 

"  In  the  early  days  of  the  gold  excitement 
in  the  Black  Hills  I  was  at  Tucker's  Gulch, 
working  in  the  Daily  Prospector  office. 
Henry  McNabb  was  the  editor.  He  was  a 
little  sawed-off  sample  of  humanity,  some 
five  feet  high,  and  weighing  about  a  hun 
dred  and  ten  pounds.  By  some  congenital 
misdeal,  however,  he  had  got,  in  the  matter 
of  combativeness,  the  disposition  of  a  man 
twice  as  high  and  weighing  seven  or  eight 
hundred  pounds.  As  a  consequence  he  was 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

always  in  hot  water,  though,  to  do  him 
justice,  on  the  occasion  I  have  in  mind  it 
was  not  the  fault  of  his  peppery  temper 
which  brought  about  the  trouble,  but  cir 
cumstances  over  which  he  had  no  control 
"  The  disproportion  in  Mr.  McNabb's  size 
and  temper  rendered  it  necessary  to  keep  a 
fighting  editor  on  the  staff,  and  I  being  a 
man  of  peace,  inclined  not  only  to  turn  the 
other  cheek,  but  also  to  point  out  its  advan 
tages  for  smiting  purposes,  this  important 
position  was  held  by  a  printer  named  Snort 
—  Reuben  Snort  —  at  least  that  is  what  he 
said  his  name  was,  and  nobobdy  felt  dis 
posed  to  question  it.  Reuben  was  large 
and  square-cornered,  with  craggy  and  beet 
ling  outlines,  a  jutting  lower  jaw,  and  a 
sheer  .height  of  some  six  feet  and  two  inches. 
His  head  was  round  and  evidently  of  granite 
formation,  and  covered  with  a  heavy  growth 
of  brindled  hair.  His  nose  had  been  broken 
in  some  cataclysm  of  the  remote  past,  and 
his  ears  had  also  suffered.  Take  him  all  in 
all,  he  was  of  a  stern  and  forbidding  aspect, 
and  reminded  the  beholder  of  some  of  the 
wilder  scenery  along  the  Grand  Canyon  of 
the  Colorado  in  Arizona.  He  was  an  ex- 


JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER  S  GULCH 

tensive  and  industrious  consumer  of  tobacco, 
which  he  borrowed  with  beautiful  imparti 
ality  from  McNabb  and  me,  or  anybody  else 
who  had  any  to  lend.  In  the  matter  of 
borrowing  tobacco  Reuben  realized  the  uni 
versal  brotherhood  of  man  more  nearly  than 
any  one  I  ever  knew.  In  this  respect  he 
recognized  neither  high  nor  low,  rich  nor 
poor;  all  mankind  was  the  same  to  him.  He 
exercised  no  favoritism  in  his  borrowing, 
treating  all  men  with  equal  consideration. 
The  wife  of  one  of  the  judges  of  the  Su 
preme  Court  called  at  the  office  one  day,  and 
he  even  tried  to  borrow  some  from  her,  ob 
serving  easily,  to  her  somewhat  indignant 
reply,  that  he  '  didn't  know  but  she  might 
be  taking  some  home  to  the  court/ 

"  As  Snort  never  wrote  anything  for  the 
paper,  the  entire  editorial  work  fell  on 
McNabb.  He  used  to  turn  out  from  two  to 
three  columns  a  day,  which  we  set  up  and 
printed  off.  Our  office  was  above  a  liquor- 
store  called  the  Happy  Home.  Domestic 
difficulty  seemed  to  be  characteristic  of  the 
Happy  Home,  and  the  report  of  fire-arms 
was  frequent;  and  occasionally  a  carelessly 
aimed  bullet  would  come  ripping  up 

'53 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

through  the  floor  and  pass  off  by  way  of 
the  ceiling.  This  made  McNabb  nervous, 
and  he  finally  had  a  heavy  oak  floor  laid 
over  the  other,  which  in  a  manner  did  away 
with  the  annoyance,  though  some  of  the 
patrons  of  the  Home,  notably  one  William 
Brower,  of  Double  Eagle  Canyon,  carried 
such  uncommonly  heavy  fire-arms  that  the 
oak  planks  offered  inadequate  resistance  to 
the  flight  of  their  bullets.  But  to  give  Mr. 
Brower  his  due,  he  seldom  wasted  shots  on 
the  ceiling. 

"  But  before  I  speak  further  of  the  genial 
Brower  I  must  refer  to  a  difficulty  under 
which  the  office  labored.  This  was  lack  of 
'  sorts '  in  the  type.  Capital  W's  and  H's 
would  run  short  nearly  every  day,  while 
lower-case  n's,  s's,  and  some  other  letters 
would  frequently  fail  us.  McNabb  came  to 
show  great  ingenuity  in  avoiding  the  use 
of  the  letters  in  which  there  was  a  deficiency. 
Thus  he  would  speak  of  the  'great  and  glori 
ous  capital  city  of  this  nation,'  instead  of 
referring  to  it  simply  as  Washington,  when 
we  reported  a  growing  scarcity  of  W's ;  and 
if  s's  failed,  when  writing  of  a  new  mine  he 
would  check  his  impulse  to  say  that  *  sam- 
154 


JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER  S  GULCH 

pies  of  ore  assayed  $100  per  ton,'  and  ob 
serve  that  '  a  fragment  examined  in  the 
approved  manner  indicated  $100  per  ton.' 
But  even  with  this  letters  would  sometimes 
run  out,  when  we  would  do  the  best  we 
could,  and  I  remember  an  item  which  ap 
peared  in  this  shape:  'Jamex  Thompxon, 
of  Spearfixh,  wax  in  town  yexterday.  He 
reportx  that  the  new  xmelter  ix  in  full  blaxt. 
We  wixh  the  Conxolidated  company 
xuccexx.' 

"  McNabb  could  easily  have  replenished 
the  type  with  the  necessary  sorts,  but  he 
never  did.  No  bad  results  of  the  lack  were 
ever  experienced  till  on  the  occasion  of  a 
visit  to  town  from  Mr.  William  Brower,  be 
fore  mentioned.  Mr.  Brower  was  a  large, 
quarrelsome  man  given  to  liquor.  About 
once  a  month  he  would  come  down  from 
Double  Eagle  Canyon  and  spend  a  loud 
and  hilarious  week  in  town,  if  not  sooner 
crippled  by  a  well-aimed  bullet  or  chased 
out  by  a  sheriff's  posse.  McNabb  never 
had  any  trouble  with  him.  Indeed  he  rather 
welcomed  his  visits,  as  they  were  sure  to  be 
productive  of  local  news.  Too  frequently 
this  news  occupied  the  obituary  column. 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

But  this  'gave  McNabb  no  concern,  as  he 
was  rather  strong  on  obituaries,  and  they 
filled  up  as  much  as  anything.  In  fact 
McNabb  kept  a  supply  of  obituaries  of 
prominent  citizens  constantly  on  hand,  and 
these  were  slapped  into  the  paper  in  case 
of  an  emergency,  sometimes  before  the  de- 
cased  was  dead. 

"  It  happened  on  the  occasion  of  one  of 
Brower's  periodical  incursions  that  we  ran 
short  of  capital  B's.  Usually  these  held  out 
pretty  well,  but  there  was  a  long  reading- 
notice  of  a  coming  circus  that  day,  and  they 
always  eat  up  capitals  in  a  surprising  man 
ner.  There  were  lines  about  the  '  Bounding 
Beasts  of  the  Jungle,'  the  '  Biggest  Show 
ever  Brought  to  this  Country,'  the  '  Bow- 
Backed  Behemoth  of  the  Bottomless  Bog,' 
the  '  Conglomeration  of  Living  and  Breath 
ing  Wonders  Bought  with  the  Sacrifice  of 
Billows  of  Blood  and  Billions  of  Bullion,' 
and  so  forth.  Along  in  the  afternoon 
McNabb  saw  Brower,  and  came  in  and 
wrote  a  personal  about  him.  When  I  took 
it  off  the  copy-hook  and  saw  that  it  called 
for  capital  B's,  being  anxious  to  avoid  all 

-56 


JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER'S  GULCH 

misunderstandings  where  Brower  was  con 
cerned,  I  said  to  McNabb: 

"  '  The  cap  B's  are  all  out.  Can't  we  get 
around  these  somehow?' 

" '  Like  to  know  how  you'd  do  it,'  he  said, 
with  a  scowl,  glancing  over  the  copy. 

"'You  might  say  that  "The  first  citizen 
of  Double  Eagle  Canyon  is  observed  on 
our  streets,"  and  so  forth,'  I  suggested, 
meekly,  after  a  moment's  reflection. 

"'  Every  man  in  Double  Eagle  Canyon 
is  the  first  citizen,'  snapped  McNabb, 
scornfully. 

"'Then  we  might  pull  some  of  the  cap 
B's  in  the  circus  notice,  and  substitute  lower 
case,'  I  suggested. 

" '  Can't  afford  to  offend  an  advertiser 
these  hard  times.  Put  it  as  usual  when 
we're  short  of  a  capital,'  retorted  McNabb, 
turning  away. 

"I  went  back  to  the  case,  and  the  next 
morning  this  item  came  out  in  The 
Prospector: 

"'We  noticed  the  genial  bill  brower,  of 
Double  Eagle  Canyon,  in  our  midst  yester 
day.  He  is  a  whole-souled  man,  and  will 
stay  a  week.' 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"  It  was  about  two  o'clock  that  afternoon 
when  I  heard  heavy  steps  on  the  outside 
stairs,  and  suspected  that  Brower  was  com 
ing.  I  was  setting-  up  one  of  McNabb's 
editorials  on  '  The  Orderly  Character  of 
Tucker's  Gulch/  when  the  door  opened,  and 
I  saw  that  my  suspicions  had  been  well 
founded.  Bill  Brower  towered  before  us. 
His  genial  eye  was  of  the  color  of  an  au 
tumn  sunset,  and  the  flavor  of  his  breath 
filled  the  office  like  an  in-rolling  fog.  He 
stepped  to  McNabb,  carrying  a  copy  of  the 
paper  with  an  unsteady  ringer  on  the  offen 
sive  item,  and  said: 

' '  See  yere,  you  insec',  what  you  using 
them  there  ornery  little  b's  fer  when  you 
mention  a  gentleman  in  this  yere  shot-gun 
wad  of  yourn?' 

"  McNabb  kept  on  writing,  and  never 
looked  up.  '  We  used  those  because  we 
didn't  have  any  smaller  ones/  he  replied, 
calmly,  after  a  pause  that  seemed  an  eternity. 

"  The  whole-souled  Brower  drew  back  in 
astonishment,  then  he  dashed  the  paper  on 
the  floor  and  said: 

" '  Do  you  know  what  Pm  goin'  to  do  to 
a  reptile  about  your  size?  I'm  goin'  to  take 

158 


A  VISIT   FROM   ONE  OF   NATURE  S   NOBLEMEN 


JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER  S  GULCH 

him  up  and  carry  him  out  and  pound  the 
surface  of  the  yearth  with  him!  I'm  goin' 
to  wear  out  the  main  street  of  the  town  with 
him!  It's  goin'  to  take  the  path-master 
two  days  to  repair  the  road  after  I  get  done 
with  him! ' 

"  He  stepped  toward  McNabb,  who  sim 
ply  remarked,  as  he  scratched  away, 
'  Reub ! '  in  a  gentle,  half-reproving  tone. 
This  individual  laid  down  his  composing- 
stick  and  strode  over  like  the  shadow  of  a 
great  storm  advancing  across  the  desert. 
He  seized  the  dissatisfied  visitor  by  the  col 
lar  and  drew  him  back.  The  struggle  which 
followed  was  titanic.  The  first  thing  which 
was  overturned  was  the  stove.  Next  the 
job-press  went,  and  then  a  fifty-pound  keg 
of  black  news  ink.  McNabb  never  looked 
up  from  his  desk.  I  found  afterwards  that 
he  was  writing  an  article  on  *  The  Advan 
tages  in  our  Midst  offered  to  a  Good  Class 
of  Settlers.'  Part  of  the  time  the  two  men 
were  down  on  the  floor  rolling  in  the  ink. 
The  uproar  was  something  deafening.  I 
kept  up  my  work  on  'The  Orderly  Char 
acter  of  Tucker's  Gulch '  as  much  as  possi 
ble,  but  I  could  not  resist  the  temptation  to 

159 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

watch  the  struggle  out  of  the  corner  of  my 
eye.  The  terms  those  two  men  applied  to 
each  other,  when  they  could  catch  enough 
breath  for  it,  were  something  shocking  to 
hear.  There  was  no  mincing  matters  — 
each  let  the  other  know  just  what  he  thought 
of  him.  Once  the  visiting  earthquake  was 
using  the  mallet  to  pound  the  head  of  the 
resident  tornado,  who  responded  with  a 
brass-lined  galley;  but  neither  seemed  to 
make  any  impression  on  the  unyielding 
countenance  of  the  other.  After  a  time 
Reuben  got  some  sort  of  a  purchase  on  his 
antagonist  and  pushed  -him  through  the 
light  pine  door,  smashing  it  utterly.  I  heard 
them  struggling  on  the  landing  at  the  head 
of  the  stairs  outside,  then  suddenly  there 
was  a  series  of  thumps  which  shook  the 
building.  McNabb  casually  tucked  his  pen 
behind  his  ear,  gathered  up  the  loose  leaves 
of  his  manuscript,  and  said: 

" '  Something  seems  to  be  falling  yearth- 
ward.' 

"Just  then  Reub  came  in  and  went  back 
to  his  case,  carelessly,  as  if  he  had  been  out 
to  mail  a  letter. 

1 60 


JOURNALISM  AT  TUCKER'S  GULCH 

:<Do  we  need  to  use  cap  B?s  for  him?' 
asked  McNabb. 

'  It  ain't  necessary,'  answered  Reub. 

"  McNabb  scratched  off  an  item,  and  this 
is  the  way  it  appeared  the  next  morning: 

"bill  brower,  of  Double  Eagle  Canyon, 
made  us  a  pleasant  call  yesterday,  bill 
brower  is  one  of  nature's  noblemen,  a  good 
neighbor,  and  a  jovial  companion.  Drop 
in  again,  billy,  when  you  have  time  to  make 
a  longer  stay.' 

"And  as  long  as  I  was  there  McNabb 
never  got  any  more  type;  but  though  we 
chronicled  the  movements  of  the  gentleman 
from  Double  Eagle  Canyon  always  with 
small  b's,  no  matter  how  many  large  ones 
there  were,  he  never  came  in  to  see  us  about 
it  again." 


XVI 

RECOLLECTIONS   OF  THE  STAGE 

Forty  years'  experience  in  various  capa 
cities,  if  not  actually  on  the  stage  at  least 
around  the  edge  of  it,  had  given  the  old 
property  man  a  reminiscent  fund  of  large 
proportions.  On  this,  of  a  midnight,  ^the 
performance  over,  he  was  fond  of  drawing, 
aided  only  by  the  gentle  influence  of  a  pot 
of  beer.  If  his  memory  and  regard  for  the 
truth  were  to  be  trusted,  he  had  witnessed 
many  stormy  scenes  in  both  the  realistic  and 
the  romantic  drama. 

"  Mistakes  will  occur,  and  things  will  get 
mixed  up  in  the  theatrical  business  as  well 
as  in  any  other,"  he  observed  one  night, 
seated  on  a  "  practical "  stump.  "  I  remem 
ber  the  season  when  I  was  with  '  The  Coun 
try  Farm.'  Everything  real,  you  know,—- 
real  cows,  horses,  chickens,  and  all  that  sort 
of  -stuff.  One  act  was  in  the  city,  and  there 
were  real  fire-engines,  cable-cars,  ferry 
boats,  policemen,  and  such  like.  Good 
162 


RECOLLECTIONS   OF   THE   STAGE 

play,  and  took  in  money  by  the  barrelful, 
but  hard  work  for  me.  Had  to  buy  fresh 
veg'tables  for  the  cows  to  eat  in  full  view 
of  the  augence,  and  look  after  a  whole  raft 
of  such  things. 

"  One  night  out  at  Dubuque,  Iowa,  just 
as  the  curtain  went  up,  the  bay  mule,  who 
appeared  in  the  first  tableau,  kicked  the 
brass  cannon  used  in  the  Fourth-of-July 
scene.  He  was  a  powerful  kicker,  having 
been  practicing  on  me  for  about  three 
months,  and  the  heat  generated  by  the  strik 
ing  of  his  shoe  against  the  cannon  set  off  the 
charge,  and  it  blazed  away  right  among  the 
real  cows  and  other  animals.  The  whole 
caboodle  of  'em  stampeded  straight  onto 
the  stage.  The  real  chickens  also  flew  on, 
and  the  fire-engine  horses  likewise  naturally 
charged  in,  the  racket  being  right  in  their 
line.  The  stage  hands  and  most  of  the  act 
ors  rushed  on  to  try  to  'straighten  out  the 
tangle.  About  this  time  a  water-pipe  burst, 
and  something  set  off  the  thunder-machine, 
and  it  began  to  thunder  worse  than  I  had 
ever  heard  it  before  in  a  long  and  eventful 
life.  This  jarred  the  snow  department,  and 
the  paper  flakes  began  to  flutter  down  pretty 
163 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

lively,  while  a  box  of  red  fire  in  the  wings 
caught  from  the  smouldering  cannon  wad 
ding,  and  cast  a  lurid  and  fitful  glare  o'er 
the  general  cataclysm,  as  I  may  call  it. 
The  real  Durham  bull  tossed  the  heavy  vil 
lain  on  his  horns,  and  the  real  old  South 
down  ram  butted  the  comic  man  across  the 
foot-lights  and  back  into  the  neighborhood 
of  the  fifth  row,  landing  him  in  the  lap  of  his 
honor  the  Mayor.  It  was  a  scene  long  to 
be  remembered,  with  the  chickens  flying  up 
into  the  proscenium  boxes  and  cackling  like 
mad,  and  the  orchestra  trying  to  play  the 
whole  thing  down  with  a  red-hot  selection 
from  Wagner.  But  we  got  it  all  straight 
ened  out  at  last." 

"  But  what  about  the  audience?  "  inquired 
an  innocent  listener.  "  Wasn't  there  a 
panic?" 

"  Not  a  bit  of  it.  That's  the  funny  part  of 
the  whole  thing.  They  were  a  very  intelli 
gent  augence,  right  up  to  date  on  the  realis 
tic  drama,  and  they  thought  it  was  the  first 
act.  Never  heard  such  applause  in  my  life. 
The  manager  wanted  to  repeat  the  thing 
every  night  in  place  of  the  opening  scene; 


164 


RECOLLECTIONS   OF  THE  STAGE 

but  the  author  wouldn't  listen  to  it.  He 
said  it  wasn't  Art. 

"  There's  always  a  pile  of  trouble  with  this 
'ere  realistic  drama,  anyhow.  I  remember 
when  I  was  with  '  The  Old  Barnyard '  how 
one  night  at  Binghamton  the  leading  ox  got 
mad,  and  switched  his  tail  till  he  knocked 
the  cigar  out  of  the  'hero's  mouth,  and  into 
the  load  of  hay,  and  set  it  afire,  and  we  had 
to  use  all  the  real  water  from  the  tank  scene 
to  put  it  out.  But  I  don't  know  as  it's 
much  worse  than  the  legit,  after  all  —  only 
different. 

"  I  shall  never  forget  that  time  at  Mans 
field,  Ohio,  when  Ned  Castle  was  appearing 
in  Shakespearing  roles.  '  As  You  Like  It ' 
was  the  play.  Had  a  big  feller  named  Mug 
gins  for  Charles,  the  rastler.  Ned  played 
Orlando.  Sizable,  Ned  was,  but  no  match 
for  Muggins,  of  course,  who  was  a  profes 
sional  rastler.  Muggins's  having  to  be 
throwed  every  night  by  Ned  made  him  very 
tired.  It  just  'bout  run  him  into  insanity. 
He  was  afraid  folks  wouldn't  understand. 
While  they  were  getting  ready,  he  would 
stand  and  wink  and  scowl  at  the  augence, 
and  pat  his  hands  up  and  down  like  you'd 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

toss  a  baby,  just  to  show  what  he  could  do 
with  the  other.  Then,  when  the  rastle  be 
gun,  he  would  just  stand  still,  and  sort  o' 
roll  his  head  and  keep  winking,  while  Ned 
pushed  and  h'isted  and  puffed;  and  then 
bime-by  he  would  give  a  kind  of  scornful 
groan  and  fall  over  disgusted.  Sometimes 
when  they  was  carrying  him  out,  and  he 
was  specially  mad,  he  would  cock  up  his  eye 
at  the  gallery,  and  say,  in  a  sort  of  dumb 
whisper,  with  his  lips  and  face, '  Dead  fake! ' 
Then  he  would  stand  round  the  wings  and 
explain  to  the  stage-hands  how  he  would 
like  to  take  Ned  up  and  shove  his  head 
down  through  the  stage-floor,  and  leave  his 
legs  waving  like  a  wilier-tree. 

"  Well,  naturally,  after  a  while  Ned  got 
tired  of  this  kind  of  thing.  When  we  struck 
Mansfield  there  was  a  professional  rastler 
named  Burke  giving  exhibitions  there. 
Ned  sent  for  him,  smuggled  him  into  his 
dressing-room,  made  him  up  like  himself, 
and  took  him  on  for  the  rastling  scene. 
When  he  stepped  to  one  side  to  take  off  his 
cloak,  he  slipped  behind  a  tree,  and  Burke 
walked  out.  Muggins  was  so  busy  gagging 
the  augence  that  he  never  seen  nothing. 
166 


RECOLLECTIONS   OF   THE   STAGE 

Burke  went  at  him  like  a  pup  at  a  rabbit- 
skin.  Lifted  him  right  off  his  feet  the  first 
grab.  '  O  excellent  young  man ! '  says 
Rosalind.  Started  to  turn  him  over  in  the 
air.  '  I  would  I  were  invisible,  to  catch  the 
strong  feller  by  the  leg/  says  Celia.  But 
Muggins  was  game,  and  onto  his  job  all 
right.  Burke  didn't  turn  him.  Muggins 
came  do\vn  on  one  foot,  and  wrapped  the 
other  leg  around  Burke's  waist  like  a  bore- 
consticktor.  '  O  excellent  young  man ! ' 
says  Rosalind.  '  I  would  I  were  invisible,  to 
catch  the  strong  feller  by  the  leg,'  says  Celia, 
there  being  nothing  else  for  'em  to  say  in 
the  lines,  and  knowing  they'd  got  to  keep 
up  their  business  while  it  lasted. 

"  Well,  the  way  them  fellers  had  it  round 
that  stage  was  a  caution.  First  one  in  the 
air,  then  the  other;  pull  and  haul;  jump  and 
jerk;  twist  and  turn;  their  teeth  set  and  their 
eyes  glaring;  Juke  Frederick  and  the  Court- 
jers  dodging  'em,  and  betting  quietly  on  the 
result,  and  Rosalind  chirping  out,  '  O  excel 
lent  young  man ! '  and  Celia  coming  in  with 
'  I  would  I  were  invisible,  to  pull  the  strong 
feller  by  the  leg!'  Grape-vine  twists,  half- 
nelsons,  back-heels,  strangle-locks,  and 
167 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

every  catch  and  holt  you  ever  heard  tell  of, 
with  the  augence  yelling  like  sixty,  and  a 
sporty  chap  with  a  plaid  shirt  standing  up 
in  the  fifth  row  selling  pools  on  the  event. 
And  Rosalind  and  Cclia  working  right  along 
on  full  time  — '  O  excellent  young  man ! ' — 
'  I  would  I  were  invisible,  to  yank  the  strong 
feller  by  the  leg!' 

"  The  two  men  made  more  noise  than  the 
thunder-machine,  and  kicked  up  the  dust 
like  a  whirlwind,  trees  a-falling,  the  hike's 
crown  on  the  foot-lights,  and  Touchstone 
knocked  over  and  his  ankle  sprained.  I 
thought  it  was  going  to  last  all  night,  when 
suddenly,  just  as  Rosalind  piped  up  for  the 
seventh  time  with  her  '  O  excellent  young 
man! '  Burke  got  some  sort  of  a  patent  twist 
on  Muggins  and  throwed  him  so  it  shook 
the  building.  Then  he  let  go  and  decamped, 
and  Ned  come  up  and  stood  over  Muggins, 
who  wasn't  seeing  anything  much  except 
stars.  '  No  more,  no  more,'  says  the  hike, 
catching  his  cue.  '  Yes,  I  beseech  your 
Grace;  I  am  not  yet  well  breathed,'  says 
Ned,  fresh  as  a  morning-glory.  And  Mug 
gins  heard  him,  and  looked  up,  and  says  he, 
thick  and  deep,  'Great  heavings!  who'd 
1 68 


RECOLLECTIONS   OF   THE   STAGE 

a-thought  he  had  it  in  him!'  Then  they 
bore  him  out  —  had  to  —  there  was  no  walk 
left  in  Muggins.  And  for  the  rest  of  the 
season  he  was  the  best  Charles  I  ever  seen, 
and  never  give  no  more  trouble. 

"  Then  another  recollection  that  will  stand 
by  me  is  of  when  I  was  with  Jim  Hamilton's 
company.  The  legit  again,  but  the  rip-roar- 
ingest  time  you  ever  heard  tell  of.  Though 
it  was  all  Jim's  fault.  Jim  Hamilton  was  the 
most  particular  manager  I  ever  knowed. 
Never  satisfied.  Kick  —  why,  do  you  know 
when  we  got  a  new  La  Tour  thunder  ma 
chine  Jim  found  fault  with  it.  '  Call  that 
thunder,  do  you?'  he  asked,  disgusted  as  a 
man  who's  come  in  on  a  free  ticket ;  '  think 
that's  thunder,  hey?  Why,  I  can  eat  a  mince 
pie  and  go  to  sleep  on  a  folding  bed  and 
snore  better  thunder  than  that!'  He  was 
always  finding  fault,  too,  because  the  actors 
didn't  soliloquize  loud  enough.  *  Talk  up, 
talk  up,'  he  used  to  say,  '  the  augence  will 
think  you're  speaking  to  somebody  'stead 
of  solil'quizing.' 

"  The  play  we  was  out  with  was  '  Romeo 
and  Juliet/  and  Jim  just  about  worried  him 
self  sick  over  the  moon.  The  stage  man- 
169 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

ager  didn't  want  any  moon  at  all,  but  Jim 
wouldn't  listen  to  it.  So  we  got  the  best 
in  the  market  —  Scott  &  Thompson's  pat 
ent  adjustable  moon.  But  Jim  swore  he 
could  make  a  better  moon  with  a  punkin 
and  a  taller  candle.  Then  we  tried  the 
U.  S.  Moon  Co.'s  moon,  reversible,  the  other 
side  representing  the  sun,  but  Jim  kicked 
it  out,  saying  that  he  just  as  soon  have  a 
yellow  dog  hung  up  by  the  tail  as  that 
moon.  He  vowed  he'd  make  a  moon  him 
self,  and  he  did. 

"  And  I  must  say  that  Jim's  moon  was 
a  good  one,  too.  I  don't  believe  one  of 
these  here  'stronomers  could  have  told  it 
from  the  genuine  —  not  without  a  tele 
scope  a  rod  long,  anyhow.  In  fact,  it 
seemed  to  me  it  laid  over  the  regular  moon 
in  some  ways  —  clearer  complected  and 
sharper  edges.  It  used  to  just  make  the 
augence  sneeze  and  button  up  their  coats, 
it  give  such  a  feeling  of  night  air,  you  know. 
If  Jim  had  been  content  to  push  it  up  a  lit 
tle  and  leave  it  stationary  as  the  scene  went 
on  and  people  sort  of  got  interested  in 
something  else  he  would  have  been  all 
right,  but,  no,  that  moon  had  to  keep  rising 
170 


RECOLLECTIONS   OF   THE   STAGE 

all  the  time  and  a-sailing  along  in  the  heav- 
ings  whether  anybody  was  looking  at  it  or 
not.  Jim  had  enough  machinery  about  it 
to  run  a  woollen  factory.  Got  a  patent  onto 
it  —  advertised  it  in  the  professional  papers 
as  the  Hamilton  Diana  of  the  Night,  an 
Automatic  Moon;  with  either  Low  or  High 
Gear;  and  with  an  Attachment  allowing  it 
to  be  snapped  back  to  the  Horizon  for  a 
new  start  in  the  case  of  long  Scenes. 
Ring  to  go'  round  it  without  extra  charge. 
You  see,  Jim  always  held  that  if  there  was 
a  storm  in  the  third  act  then  there  ought 
to  be  a  ring  around  the  moon  in  the  second 
act,  'cause  a  ring  means  coming  bad 
weather. 

"  Well,  it  worked  all  right  for  some  time, 
but  one  night  at  Kokomo  the  sprocket 
wheel  slipped  and  Jim's  moon  went  to  cut 
ting  up  monkey  shines.  Romeo  was  up  on 
the  balcony,  and  him  and  Juliet  was  carry 
ing  on  as  usual,  when  suddenly  that  moon 
shot  up  to  the  flies  at  about  a  mile  a  minute. 
Then  down  it  went  four  times  as  fast. 
You  see,  Jim's  patent  fly-back  had  got  in 
its  work.  Up  she  went  again,  and  back  she 
went  again,  whizzing  like  a  rocket,  with  the 
171 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

machinery  rattling  and  rumbling  behind  the 
scenes.  Them  lovers  on  the  balcony  caught 
on  right  away,  and  I  saw  they  was  pretty 
nervous,  and  kept  watching  it,  'specially 
when  it  got  to  throwing  out  smoke  and 
sparks,  and  sizzing  and  sputtering.  '  Lady/ 
says  Romeo,  '  by  yender  blessed  automatic 
moon/ —  Jim  had  changed  the  wording  a 
little  — '  by  yender  blessed  automatic  moon 
I  swear,  That  tips  with  silver  all  the  fruit 
tree  tops, — '  and  this  was  the  cue  for  Juliet 
to  bust  in  with',  '  O,  swear  not  by  the  auto 
matic,  the  inconstant  automatic,  That 
monthly  changes  in  her  circling  orb,  Lest 
that  thy  love  prove  likewise  variable/  And 
right  here  that  blamed  old  moon  exploded 
like  a  bum-shell,  and  chunks  flew  in  all  di 
rections.  Romeo  got  a  sizable  piece  on  his 
jaw,  and  he  skun  down  the  ladder  like  a  cat, 
just  having  presence  of  mind  enough  to 
holler  back,  '  You're  right,  my  love,  that 
there  moon  ain't  the  proper  tiling  to  swear 
by!'  but  if  you  could  a-heard  him  after  he 
got  out  in  the  wings  swear  at  it  you'd 
a-remembered  it  as  long  as  you  lived.  His 
remarks  was  more  jerking  and  explosive 
than  the  moon." 

172 


XVII 

CORONER    RAFFLEBONE 

Discovering,  Saturday  afternoon,  that, 
contrary  to  his  usual  practice,  my  printer 
had  not  drawn  his  entire  salary  during  the 
week,  ten  cents  at  a  time,  for  obvious  pur 
poses,  and  that  there  was  money  due  him 
which  I  did  not  have,  I  wrote  out  the  past- 
due  subscription  bill  of  Mr.  Milo  Bush,  and 
started  forth  with  the  hope  of  making  up 
the  deficit.  I  found  Mr.  Bush  seated  on 
the  counter  in  Shanks's  grocery  store,  en 
gaged  in  the  study  of  air  currents,  a  scien 
tific  inquiry  carried  on  by  close  observation 
of  the  smoke  from  a  fierce  eruption  in  an 
ancient  corn-cob  pipe.  I  handed  him  the 
bill,  which  he  read  with  unfeigned  interest. 
Then  he  looked  up  with  an  animated  ex 
pression,  and  said, 

"  By  George,  young  man,  reminds  me  of 
old  Doc  RafBebone,  who  come  out  here 
in  '78." 

"Yes?"  I  replied,  with  mild  concern,  as, 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

with  some  alarm,  I. observed  him  carelessly 
fold  the  bill  and  thrust  it  into  his  pocket. 

"  Made  me  think  of  Doc  soon  as  I  seen 
it,"  went  on  Mr.  Bush.  "  You  never  knowed 
Doc  —  his  wife  chased  him  out  of  the  Ter 
ritory  before  your  time.  You're  a  good 
bit  of  a  tenderfoot,  though  you  ain't  so  bad, 
either.  The  average  tenderfoot  don't  know 
enough  to  get  up  when  he  falls  down,  but 
I'll  say  for  you,  young  man,  that  you  do. 
You  have  your  weak  p'ints,  of  course,  phy 
sically  and  mentally,  but,  as  I  often  say  to 
the  boys  when  they  are  a-running  of  you 
down,  says  I,  '  The  cuss  ain't  so  big  a  fool 
as  he  looks' — just  like  that  I  put  it  to  'em, 
many's  the  time." 

"  But  your  friend,  the  Doctor? "  I  ob 
served,  in  an  insinuating  tone. 

"  Coming  to  him,  young  man,"  he  re 
turned,  as  he  punched  down  the  ashes  in 
his  pipe  with  a  finger  a  half-inch  shorter 
than  it  should  have  been,  apparently,  from 
its  black  and  charred  condition,  having  been 
gradually  burned  off  through  long  years 
of  such  service.  "  Old  Doc  Rafflebone. 
Come  from  Peoria.  Tried  to  shake  his  wife, 
but  she  got  here  on  the  next  stage.  Might 


CORONER    RAFFLEBONE 

as  well  tried  to  shake  his  dispersition. 
When  that  woman  called  off,  Doc  danced, 
you  bet!  Used  to  sign  hisself  Dr.  Seneca 
Rafflebone,  H.  M.  P.,  C  A.  D.  N,  which 
meant  Hoss  and  Mule  Physician,  Calls  An 
swered  Day  and  Night.  That's  what  Doc 
was  edecated  for  —  a  veteran.  He  was  a 
success  with  hosses,  too,  but  he  never 
seemed  to  get  onto  the  fine  p'ints  of  doctor 
ing  folks.  The  trouble  was  in  graderating 
the  doses.  His  idea  was  that  if  a  hoss 
weighing  twelve  hundred  required  a  certain 
dose,  a  man  weighing  two  hundred  needed 
just  one-sixth  of  the  amount." 

Mr.  Bush  paused,  puffed  strenuously  at 
his  pipe,  but  failing  in  a  responsive  cloud, 
abstractedly  drew  my  bill  from  his  pocket, 
lit  it  at  the  stove,  and  applied  the  torch  to 
the  slumbering  bowl,  vigorously  stoking  it 
meantime  with  his  ringer. 

"The  theory  seems  sound,"  I  observed, 
with  a  weak  show  of  cheerfulness. 

"  Sound  as  a  nut.  But  the  difficulty  was 
here:  the  man  might  weigh  a  hundred  and 
sixty-nine,  or  a  hundred  and  forty-two.  An 
Ai  Arithmetic  scholar  could  probably  figure 
it  out  even  in  this  case,  and  fix  up  the  dose, 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

but  Doc  wa'n't  more'n  'bout  Zi4,  or  there 
abouts,  on  'rithmetic,  and  these  odd-size 
men  bothered  him  so  much  that  finally  he 
refused  to  treat  any  man  that  didn't  weigh 
an  even  two  hundred.  He  stuck  to  this  till 
after  he  was  elected  coroner;  then  he  didn't 
care,  'cause  when  he  couldn't  treat  a  man 
no  more  in  his  private  professional  capac'ty 
he  could  sock  it  to  him  in  his  official 
capac'ty,  and  collect  one  bill  from  the  wid- 
der  and  the  other  from  the  county. 

"But  by-and-by  a  reg'lar  M.  D.  doctor 
come  out,  and  Doc  Rafflebone's  practice  fell 
off.  He  kept  the  confidence  of  hoss-owners, 
but  the  more  loving  and  better  class  of  pa 
rents  didn't  go  to  him  for  their  children. 
He  never  had  been  no  success  with  children 
anyhow,  owing  to  their  uncertain  and 
mixed-up  sizes.  The  new  Doc  not  only 
busted  up  Rafflebone's  practice,  but 
knocked  out  his  coroner  business  pretty 
well  too,  because  without  Rafflebone's  prac 
tice  sudden  death  become  just  about  un 
known  in  Bon  Pierre  County.  But  Doc 
was  enterprising  —  you  never  seen  an  enter- 
prisinger  man  in  your  life.  He  used  to  go 
about  with  a  brace  of  extra  six-shooters  in 
176 


CORONER    RAFFLEBONE 

his  pocket,  and  if  he  met  a  man  that  was 
anyways  mad  he  would  pull  out  one  of  the 
guns  and  offer  to  lend  it  to  him,  with  the 
advice  to  go  and  shoot  the  other  feller. 
'  You  know  the  old  proverb,'  Doc  would 
say  to  the  man,  * "  when  a  pusson  riles  you, 
pop  it  to  him,  and  then  count  a  hundred." ' 
Doc  worked  up  a  few  cases  this  way,  but 
not  many.  Then  Fourth  of  July  come 
along,  and  a  sham  battle  was  arranged  as 
one  of  the  attractions  of  the  day.  Doc  got 
at  the  ammunition  the  night  before  and 
substituted  a  lot  of  ball  cartridges  for  the 
blanks;  but  the  boys  got  onto  his  game. 
This  discouraged  him  some'at,  but  he  didn't 
give  up,  nohow.  Doc  Rafflebone  was'Old 
Man  Enterprise  hisself! 

"  Soon  after  the  Fourth  there  come  along 
a  circus.  It  was  the  first  circus  that  ever 
struck  the  Territory,  and  a  good  show, 
though  the  zebra  wouldn't  wash.  It  rained 
the  night  before  and  his  cage  leaked,  and 
it  come  out  that  he  wa'n't  no  fast-color 
zebra.  That  there  zebra,  to  tell  the  honest 
trooth,  was  just  about  one  hundred  per  cent. 
Rocky  Mountain  burro.  Doc  went  around 
to  the  proprietor  of  the  show  and  wanted 

i77 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

to  treat  the  zebra.  Let  on  he  had  a  way 
to  set  the  stripes  so  they  wouldn't  either 
run  or  fade,  and  offered  to  make  'em  red, 
white,  and  blue,  and  give  the  critter  a  yel 
low  tail,  and  make  one  ear  green  and  t'other 
one  purple.  The  proprietor  thought  Doc 
was  trying  to  josh  him,  so  he  kicked  him 
out.  That  proprietor  didn't  know  what  he 
was  a-kicking. 

"  Doc  made  up  his  mind  to  have  revenge. 
Fust  he  tried  to  get  up  a  row  betwixt  some 
cowboys  that  was  feeling  pretty  comfort 
able  and  the  circus  man  but  it  didn't  work. 
Then  he  seen  the  side-show,  and  went  over. 
'How  are  yer  animals?'  says  Doc  to  the 
man.  '  All  well  except  the  two-headed  girl, 
which  has  a  cough  in  her  left  throat,'  says 
the  man.  '  I  am  Doc  Rafflebone,  H.  M.  P., 
C  A.  D.  N.,'  says  Doc,  '  and  I  can  cure  that 
cough.'  The  man  wouldn't  pass  him,  and 
after  argeing  a  spell,  Doc  bought  a  ticket 
and  went  in.  He  didn't  find  any  two-headed 
girl,  nor  nothing  else  much  except  a  mer 
maid,  and  that  wa'n't  alive  —  fact,  young 
man,  dead  mermaid!  Doc  was  plumb  beat; 
but  just  then  he  seen  a  sign,  '  Mummy  of 
Rameses  I. —  From  Egypt/  and  he  exam- 
178 


CORONER    RAFFLEBONE 

ines  it.  Then  an  idea  struck  him,  and  he 
slapped  his  leg  and  turned  to  a  band  of  us 
that  was  a-sizing  up  the  mermaid,  and  says 
he,  '  Boys,  there's  suspicious  circumstances 
connected  with  this  here  mummy  —  we'll 
just  hold  an  inquest  on  him! ' 

"  So  you  may  snatch  my  buttons,  young 
man,  if  that  wa'n't  percisely  what  we  done 
—  sot  on  old  Rameses  I.,  and  I  was  fore 
man  of  the  jury.  The  proprietor  come  in 
and  begun  kicking.  '  Have  you  got  a  cer 
tificate  from  the  physician  what  attended 
the  party  in  his  last  illness? '  says  Doc,  sweet 
as  butter.  'Thunder!  no,'  says  the  pro 
prietor.  '  Then  the  inquest  proceeds,'  says 
Doc.  The  proprietor  kept  making  hisself 
obnoxious,  so  Doc  fined  him  ten  dollars  for 
contempt  of  court,  and  he  shut  up.  We 
took  the  afternoon  for  it,  and  sifted  the 
thing  to  the  bottom.  We  summoned 
twenty  or  thirty  witnesses,  mostly  the  boys, 
picking  out  them  that  we  thought  needed 
the  fees  and  would  keep  the  money  in  cir 
culation.  None  of  'em  seemed  to  know 
much  about  the  case,  though  Jim  Shaw 
thought  he  had  seen  the  party  in  St.  Louis 
two  years  before,  where  he  were  a-lecturing 
179 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

about  the  'Effect  on  the  System  of  Blue 
Glass';  but  Jim  didn't  know  nothing  con 
cerning  what  had  killed  him.  So,  after 
doing  all  we  could,  we  brought  in  a  verdict 
that  'The  party  come  to  his  death  from 
causes  unknown  to  this  here  jury';  and 
Bon  Pierre  County  being  poor,  we  soaked 
the  costs  to  the  proprietor.  '  Mebby  he'll 
let  me  treat  that  there  cotton  zebra  of  his'n 
next  time/  says  Doc. 

''That's  all,  young  man.  I'm  a-comin' 
into  yer  office  some  day  next  week  to  tell 
you  how  you  want  to  handle  this  here  tariff 
question  in  yer  paper,  and  I  sha'n't  charge 
you  a  cent  for  it!" 


XVIII 
"SIMMONS" 

We  got  him  on  subscription.  Sooner 
or  later  we  got  everything  on  subscription 
—  even  money ;  not  much  cord-wood,  how 
ever,  because  it  was  a  prairie  country. 
Still  a  man  named  Parkinson  once  brought 
in  some  wood  neatly  sawed,  stove  length. 
He  did  it  under  protest,  however,  his  sub 
scription  being  back  two  years,  and  we 
threatening  to  sue.  So  Parkinson  brought 
in  a  cord,  making  unpleasant  remarks  as 
he  unloaded  it,  and  scattering  it  around  in  a 
barbaric  manner.  That  man  Parkinson 
was  an  enemy  of  mankind. 

The  fire  was  low  the  next  morning  at 
breakfast  time.  Hilda  tossed  in  four  or 
five  sticks  of  the  Parkinson  fuel.  There 
followed  a  series  of  the  most  terrific  explo 
sions.  Perhaps  I  ought  to  mention  the 
appearance  of  the  cat  in  the  dining-room 
first.  Anyhow  the  cat  would  have  reached 
us  before  the  sound  if  her  tail  had  not  been 
181 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

so  big  that  it  impeded  her  progress  through 
the  doors.  That  cat  was  frightened,  and 
passed  on  through  the  parlor,  out  a  front 
window  and  on  across  the  landscape. 
Hilda  came  next,  her  front  hair  singed. 
Bang,  bang!  went  the  reports  in  the  kit 
chen.  A  neighbor  looked  in  and  said  our 
chimney  was  squirting  fire  and  ashes  — 
possibly  lava.  Something,  too,  he  said, 
just  went  out  the  front  window.  My  teeth 
were  chattering,  but  I  was  bound  to  be 
calm  and  said,  "  Yes,  the  maid  was  popping 
corn  in  the  kitchen."  Hilda  denied  it. 
"  Aye  tank,"  she  said,  "  de  man  dat  talk  loud 
and  say  he  was  no  dog-goned  sucker,  dat 
he  plooged  de  gunpowders  in  de  wood." 
So  it  was  indeed.  What  shall  we  say  of  a 
man  who  thus  tries  to  blow  up  his  editor? 
As  for  that  inconsiderate  cat,  she  never  was 
seen  in  those  parts  again.  I  have  always 
had  a  theory  that  she  moved  on  in  an  abso 
lutely  straight  line,  which,  owing  to  the 
curvature  of  the  earth,  finally  threw  her  off 
into  space,  and  she  became  a  miniature 
comet.  Her  tail  was  right  for  comet  pur 
poses  anyhow. 

Simmons  came  on  subscription  also,  but 
182 


"SIMMONS" 

willingly.  Jim  Simmons  of  Pelican  Lake 
was  not  the  man  to  torpedo  a  journalist.  I 
remember  how  nervous  he  was  when  he 
came  into  the  office,  and  how  he  fidgeted 
about.  "  Did  you  ever  live  in  the  South?  " 
he  finally  blurted  out.  I  told  him  "  No." 
He  seemed  somewhat  relieved. 

"  Do  you  —  do  you  know  anything  about 
swine?"  he  went  on. 

"  Swine  have  four  feet,"  I  answered  — 
"  one  on  each  corner.  They  root  and  squeal 
and  eventually  become  pork." 

"  Yes,  yes,"  returned  Jim,  "  but  do  you 
know  about  the  different  breeds?" 

"  No."     He  seemed  further  relieved. 

"  Would  you  —  would  you,"  he  went  on 
cautiously,  "  know  a  Durham  swine  from 
a  Cleveland  Bay  swine?  " 

"  No."  He  drew  a  deep  breath,  and  most 
of  his  anxiety  was  gone. 

"  Did  you  ever  hear  of  the  razorback 
breed  of  swine?"  he  said  firmly. 

"  Never,"  I  answered.  Jim  slapped  his 
leg  and  smiled.  Then  he  leaned  closer  and 
said: 

"  Young  man,  I've  got  something  for  you 
on  subscription  —  something  that  you  don't 

183 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

get  every  day,  not  by  a  long  shot!  Out  in 
that  there  box  in  my  wagon  I've  got  for 
you  a  genuine  —  Alabama  —  razor  —  back 
— swine!"  I  rose  up  and  took  Jim  Sim- 
mons's  hand  solemnly.  Then  he  said  I  was 
to  come  out  to  the  wagon  and  see  the  swine. 

"  It's  a  warm  day.  Why  didn't  you 
bring  him  in  a  crate  instead  of  a  box,  Jim?  " 
I  asked. 

"  Ah,  you  see,  you  don't  know  the  razor- 
back  breed.  Airtight  is  the  word  in  trans 
porting  razorbacks.  Peek  in  there  now, 
will  you?  "  And  he  raised  the  lid  a  trifle. 

"  Yes,  Jim,"  I  said,  "  airtight  is  the  word. 
I'll  have  a  glass  pen  made,  with  a  top  which 
screws  on  like  a  fruit  jar." 

"  Now  there  you  go  again,"  answered 
Jim.  "  The  razorback  don't  need  any  pen 
at  all.  That  swine  will  just  sleep  under 
the  office  and  pick  up  his  living  around 
town." 

"But  the  pound-master,  Jim?" 

"The  pound  nothing!  Double  j'inted 
greyhounds  fired  out  a  cannon  couldn't 
catch  that  swine."  He  took  the  cover  off 
the  box,  and  the  pig  hopped  out  and  lit  on 


184 


the  ground.  "  Notice  how  thin  he  is/'  con 
tinued  Jim  admiringly. 

"  Yes,  I  see,"  I  replied.  "  I'll  tie  a  string 
around  his  middle  and  fly  him  for  a  Chi 
nese  kite." 

"You  could  do  it!"  was  Jim's  enthusi 
astic  answer.  Then  he  added:  "You've 
got  a  prize  in  that  there  swine.  There  is 
some  folks  around  here  that  think  they've 
got  razorbacks,  but  they  ain't  pure  breed. 
They  may  be  part  razorback,  but  there  is 
other  blood  in  them.  This  one  is  a  full- 
blooded  Alabama  razorback  and  the  only 
one  in  the  territory.  He's  registered.  I 
disremember  his  number,  but  he's  in  the 
books  of  the  American  Razorback  Swine 
Association.  Don't  be  afraid  to  make  a  test 
case  of  him  with  the  pound-master,"  and 
Jim  drove  away.  The  creature  stood  there 
in  a  defiant  attitude,  looking  at  me.  I  ap 
proached,  saying,  "  Good  piggy."  With  a 
snort  he  flopped  around  on  his  forward  legs 
and  disappeared  down  the  street  in  a  cloud 
of  dust.  "  He's  as  fast  as  the  cat,"  I  mused, 
"  but  not  so  graceful." 

I  went  into  the  office  and  wrote  a  glow 
ing  item  about  the  razorback.  I  referred 

185 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

to  him  as  "  a  pleasing  pachyderm "  and 
spoke  proudly  of  the  purity  of  his  breed. 
"  Thanks  to  the  generosity  of  the  genial 
Jim  Simmons,  one  of  nature's  noblemen," 
I  wrote,  u  ye  editor  is  now  the  possessor  of 
the  only  pure  bred  razorback  in  the  terri 
tory.  If  any  of  our  readers  hear  a  whizzing 
sound  passing  their  doors,  they  may  know 
it  is  our  porker  going  by.  What  are  you 
going  to  do  about  it,  Mr.  Pound  Master?" 
I  even  ran  in  a  little  anecdotical  item  else 
where,  telling  how  Jim,  when  he  lived  in 
Arkansas  and  worked  for  an  uncle  named 
Green,  who  kept  a  store,  used  to  sign  re 
ceipts  thus :  "  Green,  per  Simmons." 
There  was  no  truth  in  it,  but  I  knew  it 
would  please  Jim. 

Mark  ye  the  spite,  the  cruelty  of  human 
nature!  I  was  happy.  I  knew  nothing 
about  swine.  I  had  believed  all  that  Jim 
said.  I  really  thought  that  in  that  pig  I 
had  something  rare  and  valuable.  But 
when  the  paper  appeared  the  townspeople 
came  in,  many  that  called  themselves 
my  friends,  and  told  me  the  truth  —  that  the 
razorback  is  a  degenerate  scrub  unworthy 
serious  attention;  that  he  furnishes  but  one 
186 


thing  for  human  use,  and  that  is  bristles, 
and  not  many  of  them,  they  being  mostly 
worn  off  by  the  rapidity  of  his  flight 
through  the  air.  Some  of  them  said,  too, 
that  there  was  no  such  thing  as  the  Ameri 
can  Razorback  Swine  Association.  For 
weeks  I  inquired  after  Jim  from  his  neigh 
bors.  They  said  he  seemed  to  be  going  to 
the  other  town  altogether  nowadays.  We 
named  the  pig  Simmons  in  grateful 
remembrance. 

Shall  I  ever  forget  the  trouble  that  Sim 
mons  caused  me?  He  lived  under  the 
office,  as  Jim  said  he  would.  Mentally  Sim 
mons  was  bright,  but  he  was  a  moral  bur 
den.  Often  when  I  was  writing,  perhaps 
on  the  "  Stability  of  Our  City's  Growth," 
Simmons  would  begin  to  scratch  his  back 
on  the  floor  joists  and  shake  the  whole 
building.  He  pied  galleys  of  type  in  this 
way.  Again,  he  would  come  around  in 
front  and  poke  his  head  in  the  door  and 
snort  at  me  defiantly  and  ungratefully.  He 
had  no  means  of  knowing  what  I  was  writ 
ing,  and  I  thought  it  unkind  and  malicious 
of  him.  Sometimes  it  seemed  as  if  he  hated 
and  despised  me.  On  other  occasions  it 
187 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

appeared  as  if  he  would  in  his  poor,  dumb 
way  call  me  —  brother!  Once  I  went,  as 
member  of  a  committee,  to  the  station  to 
help  welcome  an  eastern  capitalist  who  was 
coming  with  a  view  of  investing  money  m 
the  place.  Simmons  followed  close  behind, 
like  a  dog,  and  peered  around  my  legs  at 
the  visitor  and  grunted  scornfully)  as  who 
should  say :  "  Hah,  old  moneybags !  What 
are  you?"  "Your  —  er  —  hogs  seem  fa 
miliar,"  observed  the  man.  The  rest  of  the 
committee  turned  their  backs  on  me.  "  It's 
the  editor's,"  explained  the  leader.  "  Don't 
mind  either  of  'em." 

It  was  worth  the  price  of  admission  to 
see  Simmons  root.  Your  ordinary  hog 
roots  disconnectedly,  with  a  push  in  this 
direction  and  in  that,  a  down  thrust  and  an 
uplift,  with  pauses  as  he  sniffs  and  explores 
for  possible  food.  Otherwise  Simmons. 
He  would  insert  his  snout  in  the  ground 
and  then  walk  straight  ahead,  plowing  a 
long  furrow,  throwing  the  soil  to  either  side 
as  the  bow  of  a  steamboat  throws  the  water. 
He  was  not  looking  for  food  —  simply  tak 
ing  a  constitutional.  But  he  could  root  in 
one  spot  if  the  occasion  demanded.  The 
188 


"SIMMONS" 

Baptist  church  stood  on  four  blocks  of 
wood,  after  the  manner  of  the  country.  I 
think  Simmons  was  a  Methodist  —  anyhow 
he  was  strongly  opposed  to  the  Baptists. 
He  kept  at  their  foundation  till  one  block- 
toppled  over  and  that  corner  of  the  building 
went  down  a  foot,  the  diagonally  opposite 
corner  going  up  the  same  distance;  during 
evening  service,  of  course.  The  congrega 
tion  slid  down  in  the  lower  corner  like  the 
pieces  in  a  backgammon  board.  I  heard 
Simmons's  back  scrape  on  the  floor  as  he 
came  whisking  home.  Then  there  followed 
a  long  series  of  satisfied  grunts.  He  had 
fixed  those  Baptists  at  last. 

When  we  gave  the  eastern  capitalist  a 
reception  in  Bagley's  hall,  Simmons  planted 
himself  four-square  in  the  middle  of  the 
street  in  front  and  squealed  like  10,000  un- 
oiled  wheelbarrows.  He  had  a  reversible 
voice.  When  he  expelled  the  air,  it  pro 
duced  a  nerve  destroying  shrilling.  When 
he  inhaled  it,  you  heard  a  raucous  rattle, 
blood-curdling  and  fearsome.  The  mon 
eyed  man  didn't  stay.  Simmons  chased  the 
train  half  way  to  the  next  station,  speaking 
his  mind  freely.  He  had  fixed  the  capitalist. 
189 


MR    MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

The  bills  which  I  had  to  pay  for  damage 
done  by  Simmons  were  something  disquiet 
ing.  It  got  so  that  if  any  man  in  town 
needed  a  dollar  he  would  come  to  me  and 
say  Simmons  had  done  something,  and  I 
would  give  him  the  money.  One  day  a 
man  came  in  with  a  bill  for  an  entire  patch 
of  potatoes  uprooted  by  Simmons.  I  was 
out  of  funds.  The  man  said  he  must  have 
something,  and  that  quick.  He  was  angry 
and  abusive.  I  told  him  the  only  thing  I 
could  give  him  was  a  load  of  wood.  He 
took  it.  It  happened  to  be  the  Parkinson 
wood.  This  made  more  trouble.  It  was 
becoming  a  serious  problem  what  I  should 
do  with  Simmons. 

Two  days  before  the  Fourth  of  July 
Major  Grigsby,  a  local  nuisance,  came  into 
the  office.  The  Major  was  always  some 
sort  of  an  agent  —  book,  apple  tree,  patent 
wash  boiler  or  what  not.  "  Sah,"  said  the 
Major,  "  as  you  have  announced  in  your 
valuable  papah,  we  are  to  have  a  grand 
celebration  of  the  glorious  Fourth  in  this 
town.  I  have  been  honored  with  an  app'int- 
ment  on  the  Committee  on  Sports  and 
Pastimes  of  the  Pop-u-lace.  We  have  ar- 
190 


SIMMONS 

ranged  for  a  hoss  trot,  sah ;  a  baseball  game, 
sah;  a  greased  pole,  sah,  and  other  amuse 
ments,  sah,  such  as  it  is  believed  will  appeal 
to  the  common  people,  sah,  the  bull-work  of 
the  nation,  sah.  We  lack  but  one  thing, 
my  deah  sah,  a  greased  pig.  I  have  been 
delegated  the  Committee  on  Greased  Pig." 
He  hesitated.  I  arose,  and  there  were  tears 
in  my  eyes.  "  Major,"  I  said,  grasping  his 
hand,  "  take  Simmons!  " 

"You  do  me  proud,  sah,"  answered  the 
Major,  with  feeling.  "  Thank  you,  sah. 
We  will  take  Simmons!  " 

At  ii  o'clock  on  the  glorious  day  Sim 
mons,  well  greased,  was  brought  out  to  the 
race  track  where  the  exercises  were  being 
held.  It  being  feared  that  no  one  would  chase 
him  for  himself  alone  a  dollar  bill,  gener 
ously  contributed  by  Mayor  Southwick,  was 
tied  to  his  tail.  When  he  was  released,  a 
dozen  ambitious  citizens  started  in  pursuit, 
the  Major  among  the  others.  Around  and 
around  rushed  Simmons,  the  crowd  close 
behind,  but  never  quite  coming  up  to  him. 
Suddenly,  with  a  defiant  squeal,  he  started 
across  the  prairie  straight  for  the  west.  The 
crowd  followed,  the  Major  leading.  Soon 
191 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

they  grew  dim  in  the  distance.  Then  grad 
ually  the  pursuers  could  be  seen  dropping 
out  and  returning.  This  kept  up  till  they 
were  all  back  except  the  Major.  With  the 
aid  of  good  field-glasses  he  could  be  seen 
tearing  on  20  feet  behind  Simmons  till  they 
sank  below  the  horizon.  It  cast  a  pall  over 
the  rest  of  the  day,  everybody  fearing  that 
they  might  come  back.  But  they  did  not, 
nor  was  either  ever  heard  of  again.  It  has 
never  seemed  possible  that  they  could  have 
joined  the  cat  in  interstellar  space,  but  I 
always  think  of  them  as  still  running  on, 
on,  Simmons  a  little  ahead,  waving  the  $i 
bill. 


XIX 

MR.  BUSH'S  CIRCUS 

During  one  of  the  reminiscential  inter 
ludes  indulged  in  by  Mr.  Milo  Bush,  he  told 
of  an  alleged  visit  of  a  circus  to  the  town 
some  years  before.  The  instructive  tale, 
which  from  the  impressive  manner  of  its 
delivery,  he  seemed  to  think  possessed  of 
edifying  and  perhaps  even  of  educational 
qualities,  ran  as  follows: 

"  It  was  Starbuck's  Allied  Tentatorial 
Aggravation,  a  Gigantic,  Awe-producing 
Spectacle  of  Wonders  from  the  Slimy  Deep, 
the  Higeous  Jungle,  the  Bone-strewn  Des 
ert,  and  the  Roaring  Caverns  of  the  upper 
air,  whence  blow  the  Seven  Vampire  Winds 
of  heaven  seeking  whom  they  may  destroy. 
Them  was  the  words  of  the  bills.  One 
ticket  admits  to  all  this  grand  tautological 
presentation  of  upas-like  monsters  snatched 
from  yearth's  remotest  corners  and  con 
veyed  to  your  doors.  Don't  forget  to  bring 
the  little  ones.  Children  in  arms  welcome. 

13  '93 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Special  inducements  to  famblys  fetching 
twins  and  triplets. 

"  Well,  when  the  doors  opened,  the  whole 
town  was  on  hand.  We  found  some  things 
not  up  to  the  bills  —  the  unicorn  had  only 
one  horn,  for  instance  —  but  we  were  not 
inclined  to  find  fault.  We  looked  at  the 
living  monsters  from  the  blistering  quarters 
of  this  year  awful  and  pizen-loaded  globe 
and  approved  of  'em.  We  noticed  that 
some  of  the  horrible  beasts  of  prey  had  the 
hair  worn  off  of  'em  in  spots,  but  we  j  edged 
they  was  moulting.  Then  we  passed  into 
the  main  tent. 

"  The  performance  was  first-rate.  All 
would  have  gone  well  if  Mayor  Patty  hadn't 
tried  to  ride  the  trick  mule.  Close  per 
sonal  and  political  friends  tried  to  dissuade 
him;  but,  no,  he  would  ride  that  mule.  The 
mule  throwed  him  and  cracked  his  head 
agin  the  centre  pole.  He  was  mad,  and 
went  out  and  made  complaint  before  Jedge 
Malgrave,  having  peeked  through  a  hole 
in  the  tent  and  seen  that  the  zebra  only  had 
stripes  on  the  side  towards  the  augence. 
He  charged  Starbuck,  the  sole  proprietor, 
with  obtaining  money  under  false  pretenses. 
194 


MR.  BUSH  S  CIRCUS 

"  Well,  they  brought  Starbuck  before  the 
Jedge  and  convicted  him,  having  the  zebra 
in  court,  his  public  side  marked  '  Exhibit 
A,'  and  his  private-life  side  labelled  '  Ex 
hibit  B.'  The  Jedge  talked  it  over  with 
Mayor  Patty  and  others  who  might  have 
some  igee  as  to  about  how  much  Starbuck 
had,  and  then  fined  him  $500.  Starbuck 
said  he  couldn't  pay,  and  they  put  him  in 
the  lockup.  That  settled  the  Allied  Aggra 
vation,  and  it  went  to  pieces  right  in  our 
midst. 

"  When  we  seen  we'd  got  it  on  our  hands 
we  called  a  public  meeting  to  consider  the 
situation.  Lawyer  Kingsley  made  a  speech. 
'  Gentlemen,'  says  he,  *  we  suddenly  find  a 
large  number  of  artists,  recently  engaged 
in  amoosing  and  instructing  the  crowned 
heads  of  Europe,  and  likewise  a  number  of 
monsters  ensnared  from  the  suspicious 
parts  of  the  yearth,  thrown  upon  our  char 
ity.  Shall  it  be  said  that  the  people  of  this 
city  allowed  these  artists  and  these  mon 
sters  to  suffer?  Palsied  be  this  hand  and 
may  this  tongue,  gents,  cleave  to  the  roof 
of  this  mouth,  if  such  shall  be  the  case!  I 
move  you,  sir,  that  a  fund  be  raised  to  pay 

'95 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

tor  the  keep  of  these  deserving  artists  and 
monsters,  and  also  that  volunteers  be  called 
for  to  look  after  them/ 

"  The  motion  was  carried.  Joe  Reynolds 
said  he  would  take  the  hippopotamus  if 
somebody  would  help  furnish  hay.  Tom 
Perkins  offered  to  look  after  one  tiger. 
Jason  Brack  said  he  would  board  an  artist. 
It  was  decided  to  send  the  sacred  cow  to 
Elder  Babbitt,  of  the  First  Baptist  Church, 
since  she  was  said  to  be  a  good  milker,  and 
would  pay  for  her  keep.  It  was  arranged 
to  board  the  fat  lady  and  the  other  mem 
bers  of  her  sex  at  the  hotel.  Jim  Reed  said 
he  would  take  the  ostrich.  His  igee  was 
to  set  her  on  two  hundred  hens'  eggs. 
Somebody  said  he  would  take  the  camel, 
and  another  man  offered  to  board  the  ring 
master.  I  felt  I  ought  to  do  something,  so 
I  riz  up,  and  says  I :  '  Mr.  Cheerman  and 
feller-citizens, —  I  agree  with  the  previous 
speakers  that  it  behoofs  us  to  do  something 
for  these  unfortunates.  We  must  make 
these  artists  and  these  monsters  feel  that  in 
our  buzzums  beats  the  warm  chords  of 
Christian  charity.  They  are  our  brothers, 
Mr.  Cheerman  —  that  is,  the  artists  are,  and 
196 


MR.  BUSH'S  CIRCUS 

mebby  some  of  the  monsters.  Now  is  the 
time  to  show  what  stuff  we  are  made  of. 
For  my  part,  Mr.  Cheerman,  I  stand  ready 
to  take  to  my  home  and  to  tenderly  care  for 
the  Egyptian  mummy.  He  was  no  rela 
tive  of  mine,  and  I  never  seen  him  before, 
but  if  he  shall  ever  want  for  proper  care, 
then,  gentlemen,  palsied  be  both  of  these 
hands,  and  may  this  tongue  know  naught 
in  the  future  but  the  touch  of  higeous  upas- 
like  ice-water! '  I  sot  down  amid  deefening 
applause  and  cries  of  '  Brave,  oh! '  '  What's 
the  matter  of  Bush?'  'Mark  the  perfect 
man! ' '  Three  cheers  for  Old  Man  Charity! ' 
Blushing  to  the  roots  of  my  hair,  I  went 
out,  shouldered  the  Egyptian  party,  which 
I  took  to  be  a  king,  and  carried  him  home 
and  stood  him  in  the  pantry. 

"  It  was  exciting  times  in  this  town  while 
we  had  that  there  circus  on  our  hands.  We 
got  some  good  out  of  it,  however;  we  sot 
the  steam-piano  up  in  the  Methodist  church, 
and  doubled  the  congregation.  Jim  Reed 
complained  that  he  couldn't  make  the 
ostrich  set,  and  that  she'd  picked  off  all  his 
door-knobs  and  et  'em,  and  he  wanted  to 
exchange  her  for  an  artist;  but  we  made 
197 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

him  stick  to  his  bargain.  Hank  Shoemaker 
said  that  the  tattoed  man  which  he  had  for 
his  guest  leaned  agin  the  parlor  wall-paper, 
and  the  design  come  out  and  struck  into  the 
paper;  but  we  told  him  he  must  stand  it. 
The  lions  and  tigers  kept  breaking  loose 
and  running  round  town  and  scaring  people 
and  getting  under  folks's  houses.  You 
could  hear  'em  bumping  their  heads  up  agin 
the  floor  and  lashing  their  sides  with  their 
tails.  The  way  they  yowled  nights  was  a 
caution. 

"  Some  of  the  artists  went  to  work.  The 
ringmaster  got  a  job  as  primary-school 
teacher,  and  the  clown  began  working  in 
an  undertaking  establishment.  He  was  one 
of  the  best  hands  I  ever  seen  at  giving  the 
necessary  directions  to  the  friends  of  the 
deceased.  He  was  that  solemn-looking  that 
strangers  used  to  take  him  for  one  of  the 
mourners,  and  sometimes  at  the  more  swell 
funerals  he  would  set  with  the  relatives  of 
the  departed  just  to  add  to  the  heft  of  the 
gloom.  And  all  the  time  the  king  stood 
there  in  my  pantry  and  never  made  the  least 
trouble.  When  others  complained  about 
their  charges,  I  said  to  'em :  '  Do  I  kick 
198 


MR.   BUSH  S   CIRCUS 

about  the  king?  Do  I  find  fault?  No,  sir! 
Booty,  gentlemen;  sacred  dooty.  Virtue 
is  its  own  reward.'  The  preacher,  with  the 
sacred  cow  giving  sixteen  quarts  of  milk 
per  day,  was  the  only  other  man  that  wasn't 
finding  fault  about  something.  The  con 
trast  between  the  sacred  cow,  paying  for 
her  keep  and  eight  quarts  besides,  and  that 
ostrich,  standing  about  pulling  tenpenny 
nails  out  of  the  side  of  Jim's  barn  with  a 
loud  squeak,  was  very  painful,  especially  to 
Jim.  The  minister  used  to  p'int  out  the 
difference  between  a  sacred  and  a  profane 
animal,  though,  strictly  speaking,  Jim  was 
the  profane  animal,  his  remarks  being  scan 
dalous  every  time  he  heard  another  nail 
squeak. 

"  All  the  time  the  sole  proprietor  staid  in 
jail,  cheerful  as  the  trick  mule.  Mostly  the 
artists  remained  hopeful  too,  except  the 
bearded  lady,  who  became  disgusted,  and 
walked  out  of  town.  He  said  no  bearded 
lady  with  a  true  love  for  his  art  would  sub 
mit  to  living  on  charity. 

"The  monster  that  made  the  most  trouble 
was  the  elephant.  He  wandered  all  over 
town,  and  trampled  down  folks's  gardens, 
199 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

broke  sidewalks,  and  knocked  over  fences. 
He  was  worse  than  the  giraffe,  which  used 
to  reach  in  second-story  windows  and  eat 
up  the  pillar-shams.  Nobody  would  have 
the  elephant,  so  we  concluded  to  put  him 
in  the  jail  along  with  the  sole  proprietor. 
Some  said  there  wasn't  room,  and  that  one 
or  the  other  of  'em  would  get  mashed,  but 
we  thought  we'd  try  it.  So  we  opened  the 
door  and  backed  him  in,  I  sort  of  wonder 
ing  about  the  sole  proprietor,  but  not  dar 
ing  to  look.  The  elephant's  head  wouldn't 
go  in,  so  we  shut  the  lower  half  of  the  door, 
and  left  his  head  out  the  upper  half,  which 
it  just  filled,  so  he  could  look  around  at  the 
bootiful  scenery.  Then  we  went  off,  I  still 
with  some  misgivings  about  the  sole  pro 
prietor,  and  saying  to  myself:  'Is  it  well 
with  thy  brother? '  and,  '  Would  you  like  to 
be  in  jail  alone  with  your  conscience  and 
one  large  elephant? '  But  I  hardened  my 
heart,  and  went  home  and  shook  hands 
again  with  the  king. 

"The  next  morning  the  jail  was  gone. 
We  seen  something  bobbing  about  off  on 
the  prairie  about  half  a  mile,  and  we  rid  out. 
It  was  the  jail  being  walked  off  by  the  ele- 

200 


MR.  BUSH'S  CIRCUS 

pliant,  who  was  swinging  his  trunk,  chew 
ing  his  cud,  and  gazing  at  the  elegant  land 
scape  aforesaid.  I  stooped  down  and 
looked  under  the  edge  of  the  building.  My 
heart  give  a  glad  leap  to  see  the  legs  of  the 
sole  proprietor  moving  as  he  walked  along 
under  the  elephant.  We  j  edged  it  was  a 
good  way  to  get  rid  of  both  of  'em,  so  we 
went  back.  The  craft  disappeared  below 
the  horizon  about  noon. 

"  That  afternoon  Mayor  Patty  called  an 
other  public  meeting.  Addressing  the  as 
sembled  multitood,  he  said:  'I  think  I 
voice  the  sentiments  of  the  community 
when  I  say  that  we  have  had  enough  of  this 
here  circus.  We  have  now  got  rid  of  the 
two  worst  curses  —  that  unruly  elephant 
and  the  sole  proprietor.  Peace  to  their 
tracks!  I  now,  feller-citizens,  have  a  most 
delicate  matter  to  disclose  to  you/  and  the 
Mayor  blushed  like  I  do  sometimes. 
'  Nothing  less,  gentlemen,  than  the  mar 
riage  of  the  fat  lady  and  your  humble  ser 
vant.  We  shall  then  gather  up  the  circus, 
and  my  wife  and  I  shall  go  out  with  it  hand 
in  hand  as  sole  proprietors.  The  sacred 
cow  will  remain  with  Elder  Babbitt  as  his 

201 


~MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

fee  for  performing  the  bootiful  and  impres 
sive  ceremony  here  and  now  on  this 
rosgum.' 

"Which  the  elder  done;  and  so  we  got 
rid  of  the  circus  at  last." 


XX 

IN   THE   STUDIO 

The  studio  which  is  inhabited  by  the  artist 
Max  and  his  friend  Paul,  the  poet,  is  on 
the  top  floor  of  an  old  red  brick  house  near 
Washington  Square.  It  is  a  large  front 
room  —  the  "  square  room  "  of  the  advertis 
ing  landlady  —  and  at  the  back  is  an  alcove, 
which  serves  as  a  bedroom  for  Max;  while 
the  little  room  which  opens  off  the  large 
one  at  the  side  — the  "  hall  bedroom"  of 
the  landlady  — is  the  dormitory  of  Paul. 
There  are  skylights  over  all  three,  and  in  the 
hall,  and  in  the  back  rooms  on  this  floor  — 
so  many,  indeed,  that  if  you  ascend  to  the 
roof,  of  a  warm  summer  night,  you  shall 
say  that  you  are  among  a  lot  of  chicken- 
coops. 

Great  confusion  reigns  in  the  studio 
proper,  and  rolls  over  into  the  other  rooms. 
There  is  an  immense  tiger-skin,  not  on  the 
floor,  but  on  the  wall.  There  is  a  gigantic 
fish-net,  not  on  the  wall,  but  on  the  floor. 
203 


MR.   MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

A  lay-figure,  in  great  distress,  stands  in  one 
corner;  a  plaster  Venus  in  another;  an  ana 
tomical  figure  in  still  another;  a  suit  of 
armor  in  the  fourth.  A  tall  clock,  the  min 
ute-hand  revolving  once  in  three-quarters 
of  an  hour,  and  the  other  always  hanging 
limp  at  VI,  is  edging  out  from  the  wall  as 
if  about  to  gather  up  its  scant  skirts  and 
walk  over  and  embrace  the  lay-figure. 
There  are  couches  and  easy-chairs  scattered 
about  where  they  are  most  in  the  way,  an 
old  sideboard,  a  gas-stove,  a  lot  of  ancient 
weapons,  a  brass  kettle  as  big  as  a  half- 
barrel,  a  last  year's  calendar,  a  tally-ho  horn, 
a  broken  golf  club,  twenty  unfinished  pic 
tures,  one  finished  picture,  a  stuffed  owl,  a 
live  black  cat,  a  pair  of  wooden  shoes,  a 
bottle  of  milk,  several  Chinese  umbrellas, 
a  geranium  in  a  pot,  plenty  of  books,  a 
stag's  head,  a  typewriter,  a  score  of  plaster 
casts,  a  half-dozen  Chianti  bottles,  a  bicycle 
tire,  a  coffee-pot,  a  waste-basket,  quite 
empty,  but  with  paper  enough  all  about  on 
the  floor  to  fill  it  five  times  over;  there  are 
also  ten  thousand  other  things,  which  it 
would  be  tiresome  to  name,  and  over  all 
a  peppering  of  pipes,  of  every  kind  yet  in- 
204 


IN    THE   STUDIO 

vented  by  man.  Alas !  we  tremble  violently 
to  think  of  the  fate  of  shrieking  art  and 
poetry  without  tobacco! 

It  is  in  the  afternoon;  Max  is  at  work  on 
a  black-and-white  illustration.  His  face  is 
buoyant  with  hope. 

"  Let  me  see,"  he  muses;  "  this  was  prom 
ised  for  a  week  ago  yesterday.  They  said 
they  wanted  it  by  a  week  ago  to-day,  must 
have  it  six  days  ago,  and  would  not  take  it 
if  it  was  not  done  five  days  ago ;  they  really 
hoped  for  it  four  days  ago;  I  tried  to  finish 
it  three  days  ago,  expected  to  finish  it  two 
days  ago,  the  limit  in  my  mind  was  yester 
day,  bet  Paul  a  dollar  I'd  get  through  to 
day,  hope  to  finish  to-morrow,  may  have  it 
done  by  the  day  after,  must  have  it  off  by  the 
day  after  that,  shall  just  about  apply  the  fin 
ishing  touches  on  the  day  after  that.  Well, 
well,  it  doesn't  matter!  Ah,  but  that  letter 
was  encouraging!"  Lays  down  his  pen 
and  adds,  "  Where  the  blazes  did  I  put  that 
letter?" 

The  door  opens  softly,  and  enter  Paul. 
"Hello,   old    man!"   he   calls.      "Do   you 
know,  I've  just  got  a  letter  that  makes  the 
whole  world  seem  glorious!" 
205 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"You  don't  say  so!"  answers  Max. 
"What  a  coincidence!  I  just  got  a  letter 
of  the  same  kind.  It  means  money  in  my 
pocket." 

"Eh?    Well,  we  need  it." 

"  Yes,  yes,"  answers  Max  dryly,  "  we  do." 

"  That's  what  I  said.  Who's  it  from,  any 
how?" 

"  Some  duffer  I  never  heard  of,  at  some- 
thing-ty-something  east  or  west  Somewhere 
street,  offering  me  $200  for  the  original  of 
my  '  Windy  Crossing '  picture."  - 

"Good  heavens!  Why,  you  only  asked 
$100!  " 

"  I  know;  and  fifty  would  have  taken  it." 

"  And  that  night  you  lost  your  gold  shirt 
stud  and  had  to  wear  a  brass-headed  tack, 
you'd  have  even  cut  that  price." 

"  Dear  boy,  he  could  have  had  it  that 
night  for  another  shirt  stud.  They  cost 
sixty  cents,  you  know.  Where  the  deuce 
did  I  put  that  letter,  anyhow?  I  want  to 
see  what  that  address  was."  He  begins 
rummaging  violently.  "Hello!  here's  that 
tube  of  ivory-white  I  looked  for  two  hours 
yesterday." 


206 


IN    THE   STUDIO 

"  Seems  'sif  you  might  ask  about  my 
letter." 

"A  thousand  pardons,  old  boy!  What 
is  it?" 

"  Can't  you  guess?" 

"What,  not  from  Marcellete?" 

"  It  is.  She  says  I  may  call.  And  I  was 
right  about  her  name." 

"  I  congratulate  you,  dear  Paul.  I  know 
how  you  feel.  What's  her  last  name?  " 

"  I  didn't  notice." 

"And  her  address?" 

"  I'll  look  and  see."  So  Paul  begins  rum 
maging  his  pockets,  throwing  out  great 
bundles  of  papers,  letters,  and  so  forth,  on 
the  table. 

"You'll  need  your  dress  suit,"  observes 
Max. 

"  Of  course.  I'll  take  it  out  of  pawn  with 
part  of  that  $200  we're  going  to  get." 

"  Ah,  I  forgot  that!  Where  did  I  put  that 
letter?"  He  keeps  on  rummaging,  while 
Paul  continues  to  jettison  the  cargo  in  his 
pockets.  "  Oh,  here's  that  diminishing- 
glass!  I  just  sent  Maggie  down  to 
DuBois's  for  another,"  continues  Max. 

"  It's  funny  about  that  letter,"  complains 
207 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

Paul,  beginning  to  paw  over  the  stack  on 
the  table  before  him. 

"  No  funnier  than  it  is  about  mine,"  an 
swers  Max,  impatiently,  coming  up  and 
helping  him  paw. 

A  knock  is  heard  at  the  door.  "  Only 
Maggie,"  says  Paul,  in  a  whisper.  "  Come 
in!"  he  calls  in  a  loud,  authoritative  tone. 
A  down-at-the-heel  girl  with  her  hair  held 
up  by  half  a  quill  pen  enters. 

"  Mister  Max,  ould  DuBois  says  he'll 
send  you  no  glass  without  seeing  the  color 
of  your  money." 

"  Good.  I've  found  the  old  one."  Then, 
with  dignity,  "  Go  back,  Maggie,  and  tell 
him  that  this  ends  our  business  relations." 

"  It  beats  all  what  became  of  that  letter," 
says  Paul,  again  beginning  to  explore  his 
pockets. 

"  Not  half  so  strange  as  what  became  of 
mine,"  answers  Max.  "  Did  you  take  it  out 
when  you  first  came  in?  " 

"  Possibly.  It  may  be  anywhere."  They 
both  begin  overhauling  the  whole  studio 
together. 

"  Here's  the  shoe-horn  we  were  looking 
for  the  other  night  when  we  had  the  ice- 
208 


IN   THE   STUDIO 

cream,"  calls  Paul,  as  he  emerges  from  be 
neath  a  couch. 

"  And  here's  your  sonnet  under  this  mat 
—  the  one  you  were  going  to  send  to  the 
Manhattan  Magazine,  you  know." 

"Good.  Put  it  under  the  coffee-pot; 
there's  a  variation  of  it  there  now." 

"  It  beats  me  about  that  letter,"  goes  on 
Max,  making  another  assault  on  the  table. 

"  I  know  what  we  need,  though,"  says 
Paul,  coming  up  and  re-enforcing  him. 

"What  is  it?" 

"  A  smoke." 

"The  very  thing!  But  have  we  any 
tobacco?  " 

"  Certainly.  There  in  the  tea-canister." 
They  each  seize  the  nearest  pipe,  and  fill  it 
at  the  canister. 

"Have  you  a  match?"  asks  Paul. 

"No.     Have  you?" 

"Of  course  not!  Maggie!"  There  is 
no  response. 

"  Why,  the  gas  is  burning  yet;  I  forgot  to 
turn  it  out  this  morning.  This  will  do,"  and 
he  steps  to  the  table,  tears  off  a  strip  of 
paper,  rolls  it  up,  and  soon  has  his  pipe 


209 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

giving  out  great  clouds.     Paul   does   the 
same,  and  they  sit  down  opposite. 

"  It's  odd  about  both  of  those  letters," 
says  Paul. 

"  But  they  must  be  here  somewhere." 

"  Yes ;  we  shall  find  them.  I  feel  certain 
of  that.  We  must  find  them.  My  whole 
future  happiness  depends  on  mine." 

"  Ah,  we  shall  find  them  after  a  good 
smoke." 

"Yes,  we  shall  find  both  of  them.  Re 
member  how  we  lost  the  fire-shovel?" 

"I  fancy  I  do!  Gone  two  weeks,  and 
then  we  found  it  under  your  pillow." 

"  That  was  Maggie's  fault.  I  have  always 
told  her  to  air  the  pillows." 

"  We  oughtn't  to  pay  her  our  share  for 
such  service." 

"  But  we  don't,  old  man!  " 

There  is  a  loud  knock  at  the  door.  They 
lay  down  their  pipes,  and  Paul  tiptoes  into 
the  small  room  and  peeps  through  the  key 
hole.  He  comes  back  and  whispers,  "  I 
can't  made  him  out.  Seems  to  have  pretty 
good  clothes.  Maybe  your  man  come  after 
his  picture."  Max  goes  up  a  steep  pair  of 
stairs  in  the  alcove  and  through  the  scuttle. 

2TO 


IN   THE   STUDIO 

On  the  roof  he  peeps  down  the  skylight. 
He  is  back  in  a  moment. 

"Bah!"  he  whispers,  disgusted.  "That 
collector  from  the  grocer's.  He  looked  up 
as  I  looked  down,  but  I  don't  think  he  saw 
me."  They  relight  their  pipes  with  more 
paper  torches,  and  after  knocking  twice 
more  the  man  goes  away. 

"  We  can  fix  him  out  of  that  $200," 
observes  Paul. 

. "  I  don't  know.  We  need  another  rug. 
And  it's  ridiculous  this  trying  to  live  with 
out  a  little  claret  in  the  house." 

"  True.  And  we  both  need  our  watches. 
That  clock  has  been  acting  queerly  of  late." 

"  I  have  suspected  that  clock  ever  since 
it  struck  142  at  half  past  four.  But  we  can't 
have  anything  if  we  don't  find  my  letter." 

"Oh,  yes;  but  mine  is  more  important. 
Marcellete,  Marcellete!  I  was  right  about 
her  name,  Max." 

They  both  lay  down  their  pipes  and  begin 
to  rummage  again. 

"  Here's  my  carmine,"  calls  Max,  as  he 
over-turns  the  coal-scuttle.  "  I  lost  Satur 
day  by  looking  for  it." 

A  moment  later  Paul  shouts  "  Hurrah! " 

211 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

as  he  pulls  his  hand  from  the  pocket  of  a 
buckskin  hunting- jacket  on  the  wall.  "  No! 
Thought  I'd  found  it.  It's  nothing  but  that 
bill  from  the  laundry  we  were  looking  for." 

"  No  matter.  We  have  had  two  dupli 
cates  since  we  lost  that." 

"  True  enough,"  and  he  tucks  it  behind 
a  mirror. 

"  Here's  our  dish-towel  in  the  grate,"  re 
turns  Max. 

"  You  must  have  put  it  there.  I'm  too 
good  a  housekeeper  for  that." 

"  I  never  in  my  life  had  it  in  my  hand." 

"  Neither  did  I." 

"  It  was  Maggie." 

"  We  must  cut  down  her  wages." 

By  this  time  they  are  both  back  at  the 
table,  ransacking  furiously.  Then  by  com 
mon  impulse  they  pick  up  their  pipes, 
light  them  as  before,  and  begin  to  discuss 
the  situation  earnestly.  In  their  excitement 
their  pipes  go  out  frequently,  but  they  re 
kindle  them  without  stopping  their  talk. 

"  Six  months  ago  I  saw  her  first,"  sighs 
Paul  at  last  —  "six  weary  months.  Now 
I  am  rewarded." 

"  If  you  can  find  the  letter." 

212 


IN   THE   STUDIO 

"I'll  find  it  —  never  fear.  But  we  must 
find  yours  first.  I  can't  call  without  the 
suit." 

"  The  letter  is  bound  to  turn  up." 

"  It's  odd  you  can't  remember  the  ad 
dress,"  says  Paul. 

"Oh,  it  was  unspeakable!  All  figures 
and  things." 

"But  the  name?" 

"  Hold,  I  think  I  do  remember  the  name." 

"Quick  — what?" 

"Smith!  We'll  look  it  up  in  the  direc 
tory." 

Paul  groans.  "  You  are  crazy.  There 
are  120  pages  of  Smiths  in  the  directory." 

"  Very  well ;  we  shall  find  the  letter.  Pass 
me  that  bit  of  paper;  my  pipe  is  out." 

"  Yes,  we  shall  find  them  both.  Just 
reach  me  the  canister  till  I  fill  again." 

"  It's  equally  odd  that  you  don't  remem 
ber  the  name  and  address  in  your  letter." 

"  I  never  looked  at  them.  I  saw  that  it 
was  from  her,  and  that  I  might  call.  It 
was  enough." 

It  is  now  impossible  to  see  six  feet  in  the 
studio  for  tobacco  smoke.  There  is  a  knock 
at  the  door,  followed  by  a  shrill  whistle. 


213 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"The  postman!  "  exclaims  Max. 

"  Not  so  fast.  That  tailor's  collector  car 
ries  a  postman's  whistle  now." 

"  True.    But  I  know  the  postman's  step." 

"  The  tailor's  man  is  a  clever  actor." 

"  I'll  risk  it."  He  pulls  open  the  door. 
"I  told  you!  Here  are  two  letters."  He 
thrusts  them,  unopened,  into  a  Chinese  lan 
tern,  and  they  both  resume  their  seats  and 
relight  their  pipes.  Of  course  the  letters 
are  duns. 

"  The  queer  thing  is  that  I  had  that  letter 
not  half  an  hour  before  you  came  in,"  ob 
serves  Max. 

"  But  I  had  my  letter  in  my  pocket  when 
I  did  come  in.  I  know  it,  because  I  —  I 
kissed  it  on  the  stairs. 

"  It's  probably  in  your  pocket  yet." 

"  It  is  not.  I  took  it  out,  and  instantly  it 
became  lost  in  the  confusion  of  this  detest 
able  studio.  I  should  live  alone.  A  literary 
man  must  have  order  and  system.  I  have  a 
fine  bump  of  order.  Artists  are  shiftless 
creatures,  and  invariably  slovenly  house 
keepers." 

"You  needn't  talk!     The  place  was  in 
apple-pie  order  before  you  came  here  and 
buried  everything  in  rejected  manuscripts." 
214 


IN   THE   STUDIO 

"Hah!  They  serve  at  least  to  hide  cer 
tain  unsaleable  pictures." 

"  Who  lost  a  five-dollar  bill  in  his  shoe, 
and  wore  it  there  two  weeks?" 

"  I  might  as  well  have  worn  it  there 
longer.  You  borrowed  it  immediately  I 
found  it." 

They  glare  at  each  other.  Then  Max 
says :  "  My  dear  fellow,  we  won't  quarrel. 
We  must  take  a  day  and  straighten  up  the 
place.  I  have  wanted  my  banjo  for  a 
month." 

"  So  you  have.  And  I  have  not  seen  my 
copy  of  Keats  since  the  day  Every  Thursday 
accepted  my  quatrain." 

"Let's  to  the  search  again!  " 

They  put  down  their  pipes  and  begin  a 
general  upheaval  of  the  studio.  Manu 
scripts,  letters,  bills,  pencil  studies,  frying- 
pans,  slippers,  plaster  casts,  amateur  cam 
eras,  and  other  things  fly  through  the  air. 
Rugs  are  rolled  up,  and  hangings  pulled 
down.  The  suit  of  armor  is  overturned,  and 
strikes  the  lay-figure  in  the  stomach.  An 
easel  falls,  and  an  unfinished  picture  flops 
on  the  floor. 

"  Here's  your  banjo  under  the  fish-net!  " 
calls  Paul. 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"  Odd  coincidence,"  returns  Max;  "  I  just 
found  your  Keats  in  the  water-pitcher." 

"  And  here's  my  list  of  rhymes  on  '  blos 
som.'  By  George,  if  I'd  only  had  it  yester 
day!  " 

"And  here's  —  "  But  there  is  a  loud 
knock  at  the  door,  and  they  become  as  still 
as  mice. 

Away  goes  Paul  to  the  roof,  and  after 
some  time  he  returns.  "  Boy  from  Mur- 
dock's,"  he  explains.  "  Suppose  he  had  the 
pay  for  that  short  story  of  mine." 

"  Numskull !  Why  didn't  you  pound  on 
the  skylight  and  stop  him?" 

"  I  started  to,  but  I  saw  the  landlord  com 
ing  up  the  stairs.  There  he  is  now;"  and 
there  is  a  knock  which  is  like  to  break  in 
a  door  panel.  After  three  more  the  visitor 
stumps  away.  The  two  friends  observe  him 
through  the  corner  of  the  window  ruefully 
surveying  the  front  of  the  house  from  the 
opposite  side  of  the  street.  They  sit  down 
and  again  ignite  their  pipes. 

"  I  shall  move  out  of  this  hole  to-mor 
row,"  says  Paul. 

"  It  will  save  me  the  trouble." 

"  You  will  live  here  till  the  Department 
of  Public  Works  has  to  dig  you  out." 
216 


IN   THE   STUDIO 

"You  will  fall  naturally  to  the  Depart 
ment  of  Charities  and  Correction." 

"What!" 

"What!" 

They  sit  on  the  edge  of  their  chairs  and 
glare  till  the  smoke  becomes  so  thick  that 
they  cannot  see  each  other.  Then  says 
Paul, 

"  Old  boy,  I  have  an  idea." 

"  Out  with  it." 

"We  shall  never  find  those  letters  with 
out  help." 

"  I  believe  you.    But  where  can  we  turn?  " 

"To  Maggie,  of  course." 

"  Why  didn't  we  think  of  it  before?  Mag 
gie!" 

Paul  unlocks  the  door  and  Maggie  enters. 
They  state  the  difficulty,  describe  the  letters, 
and  implore  her  to  assist  them.  She  starts 
in,  beginning  with  the  table.  They  fall  into 
a  state  of  deep  dejection. 

"That  letter  was  worth  an  even  $200  to 
me,  and  perhaps  much  more.  I  might  sell 
the  man  other  originals.  He  must  be  an 
excellent  judge  of  art" 

"  But  your  letter  was  nothing  compared 
with  mine.  A  million,  yes,  five  million  dol 
lars  would  not  have  bought  it  from  me." 

217 


MR.  MILO  BUSH  AND  OTHER  WORTHIES 

"  I  fear  we  shall  never  see  them." 

"  I  fear  you  are  right." 

"  But  the  mystery  of  it!  " 

"Yes,  yes;  yes,  yes!" 

"  But  it  need  not  keep  us  from  smoking. 
Hand  me  that  scrap  of  paper,  Maggie." 

"  And  me  that  other  one,  Maggie." 

Maggie  takes  them  up.  "  Whoy,  they're 
bits  of  letters!"  says  Maggie.  "Fresh 
ones,  too! " 

"  What !  "  shout  the  two  men,  springing 
up  and  seizing  them. 

"My  letter!"  gasps  Paul. 

"And  mine!"  wails  Max. 

They  turn  the  bits  over  and  examine 
them  carefully. 

"Is  the  address  left?"  asks  Paul. 

"  Part  of  it.  The  name  '  Smith/  What 
is  that  writing  remaining  on  yours?  " 

1 '  I  shall  be  glad  to  see  you  Wednesday 
evening.' " 

They  groan  and  collapse. 


THE  END. 


BY  FRANK  E.  STOCKTON 


THE  ASSOCIATE  HERMITS.  A  Novel.  Illustrated 
by  A.  B.  FROST.  Post  8vo,  Cloth,  Ornamental,  $1  50. 

If  there  is  a  more  droll  or  more  delightful  writer  now  liv 
ing  than  Mr.  Frank  R.  Stockton  we  should  be  slow  to  make 
his  acquaintance,  on  the  ground  that  the  limit  of  safety  might 
be  passed.  .  .  .  Mr.  Stockton's  humor  asserts  itself  admir 
ably,  and  the  story  is  altogether  enjoyable. — Independent,  N.  Y. 

The  interest  never  flags,  and  there  is  nothing  intermittent 
about  the  sparkling  humor. — Philadelphia  Press. 

THE  GREAT  STONE  OF  SARDIS.  A  Novel.  Illus 
trated  by  PETER  NEWELL.  Post  8vo,  Cloth,  Orna 
mental,  $1  50. 

The  scene  of  Mr.  Stockton's  novel  is  laid  in  the  twentieth 
century,  which  is  imagined  as  the  culmination  of  our  era  of 
science  and  invention.  The  main  episodes  are  a  journey  to 
the  centre  of  the  earth  by  means  of  a  pit  bored  by  an  auto 
matic  cartridge,  and  a  journey  to  the  North  Pole  beneath  the 
ice  of  the  Polar  Seas.  These  adventures  Mr.  Stockton  de 
scribes  with  such  simplicity  and  conviction  that  the  reader  is 
apt  to  take  the  story  in  all  seriousness  until  he  suddenly  runs 
into  some  gigantic  pleasantry  of  the  kind  that  was  unknown 
before  Mr.  Stockton  began  writing,  and  realizes  that  the  novel 
is  a  grave  and  elaborate  bit  of  fooling,  based  upon  the  scien 
tific  fads  of  the  day.  The  book  is  richly  illustrated  by  Peter 
Newell,  the  one  artist  of  modern  times  who  is  suited  to  in 
terpret  Mr.  Stockton's  characters  and  situations. 


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A  REBELLIOUS  HEROINE.    Illustrated. 

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Mrs.  Stuart  is  one  of  some  half-dozen  American  writers 
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ture  at  the  present  time.  Her  range  of  dialect  is  extraordi 
nary  ;  but,  after  all,  it  is  not  the  dialect  that  constitutes  the 
chief  value  of  her  work.  That  will  be  found  in  its  genuine 
ness,  lighted  up  as  it  is  by  superior  intelligence  and  imagina 
tion  and  delightful  humor. —  Chicago  Tribune. 

Mrs.  Stuart  is  a  genuine  humorist. — N.  Y.  Mail  and  Express. 

Few  surpass  Mrs.  Stuart  in  dialect  studies  of  negro  life  and 
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PERSONAL  RECOLLECTIONS  OF  JOAN  OF 
ARC.  By  the  Sieur  Louis  DE  CONTE  (her  page 
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A  CONNECTICUT  YANKEE  IN  KING  AR 
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THE  PRINCE  AND  THE  PAUPER. 

LIFE  ON  THE   MISSISSIPPI. 

TOM  SAWYER  ABROAD  ;  TOM  SAWYER,  DE 
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YB  73*88 


M128564 


C3I6S 


THE  UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA  LIBRARY 


